East Salem Trilogy 01-Waking Hours

by Lis Wiehl

  She flashed to the image from her dream, her father in his cheesy multi-pocketed safari vest, holding a stone. Why a stone? She wished she could call him up and tell him about her self-doubts and hear him say, “You’re gonna knock it out of the park, kiddo.”

  Dani drove south on the Sawmill Parkway, a road built in the thirties to handle a third of the traffic it handled today. When she hit a traffic jam, she threw up her hands in dismay. Today of all days to be late. She was a mile north of the Chappaqua exit and knew all the back roads, but first she had to get to the exit, and the cars weren’t moving.

  While she waited, she used her phone to log onto the Internet. She went to Google and typed in “Tommy Gunderson.”

  There were hundreds of thousands of references to the famous ex-football player. He’d been homecoming king their senior year of high school, and she, much to her own surprise, had been voted queen. She clicked on a link to a YouTube video, tagged as “FATAL HIT.” While she waited for the video to download, she remembered what she could of his career, a path that had taken him from East Salem High School to All-American at Stanford to the heights of stardom, a Super Bowl ring with MVP honors and a contract that was the highest ever paid to a linebacker.

  She clicked Play and saw Tommy, positioned twenty yards behind the line of scrimmage, deep for a linebacker, protecting against the long pass just before the two-minute warning in the conference championship game. Tommy pointing, calling out defensive signals, reading the offensive formation. A long count, hoping to draw the defense off side, then the snap. A gifted young receiver named Dwight Sykes slicing across the field at full speed, looking to his quarterback for the ball. Tommy reading the quarterback’s eyes. Tommy launching himself over a blocker to hit Sykes a split second after the ball reaches his fingertips, one of the most spectacular collisions in NFL history, the announcer says. Tommy getting to his feet after the play. His chest-thumping warrior strut.

  But Dwight Sykes doesn’t get up. Trainers and team doctors rush onto the field. The collision in slow motion shows Tommy turning his head to avoid helmet-to-helmet contact, but simultaneously, Sykes turns his head in the same direction. Sykes’s neck snapping back. Medical personnel working on Sykes where he’s fallen. Tommy on the sidelines, helmet off, waiting, concerned, then praying on one knee, head bowed. Tommy praying with his teammates circled around him, holding hands. Sykes loaded onto a stretcher, then onto a golf cart, moving slowly off the field, the crowd silent. Faces in the stands. Girls crying. Everyone waiting to see Dwight Sykes give a short wave or a thumbs-up to tell the fans he’s going to be okay.

  But Dwight Sykes doesn’t move.

  The video clip ended with a caption: “Dwight Sykes died half an hour later in an ambulance on the way to a hospital.”

  Dani was startled when a horn honked behind her. The cars ahead of her had moved thirty feet. Whoever was behind her apparently wanted to move thirty feet too.

  She logged off, put the car in first gear, and inched forward.

  She wondered what it would be like to see Tommy again. The last time she’d seen him, she’d freaked out, panicked, been overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance—a doctorate in psychiatry and she still couldn’t figure out what to call it. It wasn’t anything he’d done.

  It was who he was.

  Which had seemed, at the time, too good to be true.

  Which meant she was fooling herself.

  Hence the panic.

  3.

  The morning following Abbie Gardener’s strange visit, Tommy had gone to the fitness center at his usual time. He’d built All-Fit (the full name was All-Fit Sports, Health, and Fitness Center of Northern Westchester) when he’d retired from football, five buildings and 90,000 square feet of the latest in indoor tennis courts, turf fields, running tracks, batting cages, weight rooms, aerobic rooms, and all the newest training equipment.

  He was reading through Nordic Track catalogs, evaluating the latest gear, when the front desk told him he had an urgent call from Liam Dorsett.

  Liam was in tears. He’d been arrested, he said, or he was going to be arrested if he wasn’t already. The police had taken him out of school and were bringing him in for questioning. His dad was in South America fishing and Liam was too embarrassed to call his mother and would Tommy call her for him?

  “Slow down,” Tommy said. “Take a knee. What do they want to talk to you about?”

  The kid was six foot two and gangly, not yet grown into his body, with close-cropped hair and freckles across his face that made him look several years younger than he really was. Tommy had a hard time imagining him in police custody.

  “I don’t know,” Liam said. “It’s on the news.”

  Tommy turned on the TV in his office and saw a report on a murder at Bull’s Rock Hill.

  Liam was a nice kid, a decent athlete, but not somebody who was likely to participate in varsity sports beyond high school. He was lanky and wanted to bulk up, and Tommy had put him on a weight program and a high protein diet. In the five months that they’d been working together, Tommy had gotten to know Liam well enough to know one thing—the boy didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.

  “Sit tight,” Tommy said. “I’ll make some calls.”

  “Is it going to be all right?” Liam asked.

  “Absolutely,” Tommy said. “Don’t say anything right now if you can avoid it, but if you have to say something, tell the truth. You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Tommy called Claire Dorsett first to give her the information he had, then called Frank DeGidio. When he’d opened the center three years ago, Tommy had offered free memberships to law enforcement—partly because he was a local and knew a lot of the guys, and partly because it was never a bad idea to make the cops your friends.

  “Twice in one day,” Frank said. “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

  “I got a call from the kid you popped from ESH,” Tommy said. “Liam Dorsett. He’s one of my guys. Can you help me out?”

  “I wish I could, Tommy,” Frank said, “but they’re really clamping down on this one. It’s all need-to-know, and apparently I don’t need to know.”

  “Is that to keep it out of the papers?”

  “That’d be my guess,” the cop told him. “All I got is that they put his cell phone on the scene.”

  “Liam’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are they taking him?”

  “Kisco,” Frank said. “DA’s office. Across from the hospital. You know where that is?”

  “I do. Thanks,” Tommy said. “Next round of hot wings is on me.”

  “So was the last one,” Frank reminded him.

  Tommy had taken the Harley that morning because he knew there weren’t going to be many days left when it would be warm enough to ride it. He decided to swing by Bull’s Rock Hill on his way to the district attorney’s office.

  He rode over the hill and down the blacktop to the turn for Bull’s Rock Hill where he saw, parked at the end of the gravel road that led to the scenic overlook, a police car surrounded by TV news trucks. The land surrounding and including Bull’s Rock Hill belonged to East Salem’s only country club, known simply as The Pastures, but it was too hilly to use as part of the golf course. The name came from a natural granite formation at the top of the cliff that resembled a sleeping bull.

  Tommy parked the bike and traded his helmet for his watch cap and sunglasses, hoping no one would recognize him. He walked the final thirty yards until he stood next to one of two police officers. The other, positioned in front of a strand of yellow police tape closing off the road, was telling a handful of cameramen and reporters they would have to wait.

  “Hey,” Tommy said casually.

  “Nobody past the tape,” the cop said, and then he did a double take. Tommy had seen the look a thousand times before.

  “You’re Tommy Gunderson,” the cop said.

  “You’re Peterson,” Tommy said.

  The cop looked
stunned.

  “Your name is on your badge. I live nearby.”

  “I know,” the cop said. “I mean, I’d heard you did, but I didn’t know where.”

  “What’s all the commotion?” Tommy asked. “This where they found the girl?”

  “Up there. Flat out on the rock,” the cop said. “Not a stitch on. Weird one.”

  “When did they find her?”

  “A couple hours ago,” the cop said. “You know the area?”

  “Like the back of my hand,” Tommy said. “They know what time she died?”

  The cop shrugged. “I’m just traffic control.”

  Tommy took a few steps to the side but not forward—he had no wish to aggravate the cop, who was only doing his job. He stood, hands in his jacket pockets, trying to get a sense of things. Despite the commotion, the woods seemed oddly empty, not a bird in the sky or a squirrel rustling in the leaves. Nothing stirred, nothing moved in the wind, nothing cried out from the distance. Perhaps because of the stillness, he had a distinct sense that someone was standing behind him. When he played football and covered pass receivers on their routes, he’d always had a gift for knowing where his man was, even with his back turned, some sort of sixth sense, sportscasters had commented more than once. He felt it now.

  Yet when he turned, he was still alone. Indeed, the cop he’d been speaking with had moved off.

  You’re losing your touch, he told himself. Either that, or you’re letting yourself get spooked.

  The shiver he felt was as real as the feeling had been. It was not the sense that something had been there. It was the sense that something was still there, palpable but not visible. A sense (and now he thought he really was losing his mind) that the forest was grieving, or that something in it was dying.

  Tommy looked around. There didn’t seem to be anybody else to talk to. Suddenly he wanted to leave; he had a sense that staying would make him sick somehow, as if the place itself had been poisoned, or the air was toxic and he had to stop breathing it. It was an odd feeling, the way a worker in a nuclear power plant might feel after learning he’d just given himself a fatal dose of radiation.

  He was walking back to his motorcycle when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Gunner! Tommy Gunderson!”

  He wanted to keep walking, but the man called his name again, now from only a few yards back. He turned.

  As soon as he did, he wished he hadn’t. The out-of-breath reporter running to catch up to him was from the New York Star, a tabloid that sensationalized everything it covered and specialized in headlines that made terrible and often off-color puns. The reporter’s name was Vito Cipriano, and he looked like a rat with a hat on. He had the charm of a rat as well. Vito was pushing fifty and was at least that many pounds overweight, with hair dyed black and black-rimmed eyeglasses to match. Tommy had never seen him wearing anything except an athletic warm-up suit. Perhaps it was Vito’s presence he’d sensed, though usually that was more like getting sprayed by a skunk.

  He’d dealt with Cipriano in the past, including an incident when the man had tried to take Tommy’s picture. When Tommy raised his hand to block the lens, Cipriano had stepped forward to make it look like Tommy had punched him. The reporter tried to sue, but fortunately another member of the paparazzi had caught the entire incident on video. The fact was, Tommy had wanted to punch Cipriano countless times, just not that once.

  “Hey, man—good to see you again,” Vito said. “What brings you here?”

  “I live down the road,” Tommy said. “As you know, because you used to camp out at the end of my driveway.”

  “That’s near here?” Vito said. “I didn’t realize. I get outta Manhattan and I’m hopeless. You hear what went on up there?” He gestured over his shoulder.

  “No,” Tommy said. “You?”

  “I got nothin’,” Vito said. “I’m trying to get my editor to pony for a helicopter. So why’d you stop if you didn’t know what happened up there?”

  “Like I said,” Tommy told him, moving toward his motorcycle. “I live nearby. I was just wondering what the commotion was all about.”

  “You still in touch with Cassandra?” Vito asked.

  Tommy didn’t bother to reply.

  “How the mighty have fallen,” Vito called out.

  Following the Sykes accident, Tommy had started the next game, the Super Bowl, but outraged his fans when he removed himself from the lineup after the second series of downs. He never went back. The papers talked about all the money he’d walked away from. At the time he was engaged to twenty-five-year-old Cassandra Morton, an actress who’d appeared in a number of hit romantic comedies. The celebrity bloggers, fanzine Twitterers, and talk show ne’er-do-wells tried to tie the accident to the breakup with “America’s sweetheart.” It was Cipriano who had first reported the story that they’d been engaged and that Tommy had left Cassandra at the altar.

  Tommy waved good-bye over his shoulder.

  He raced west on Route 35 and then headed south on the Sawmill. He was forced to slow when he came to a traffic jam a few miles north of the Chappaqua exit. When he considered how scared Liam probably was, he decided to risk getting a ticket. He pulled the motorcycle onto the shoulder and sped past all the stalled cars until he reached the exit, and then took the back road into Mt. Kisco.

  The receptionist in the DA’s second-floor office told him the boy they’d brought in was downstairs, level B. In the elevator he reminded himself to stay as cheerful and as positive as he could. He knew he couldn’t tell Liam, or anyone else, at least not now, that when he’d visited the scene of the crime, he’d sensed something he’d never felt before. He couldn’t explain it. He’d been kidding himself when he thought it was Vito Cipriano he’d worried about—it was more than that, and it was not a joke.

  It was a feeling, if he had to name it, that evil had been there. Close to him. Watching him. A sickness, like cancer, but with volition and intent, looking for a host.

  4.

  The district attorney’s branch office for Northern Westchester was in Mt. Kisco, on a residential street across from Northern Westchester Hospital. The building was utterly without charm, a two-story yellow brick box shared with the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Conservation.

  Dani rode the small claustrophobic elevator up to the second floor. As the door opened, she greeted the receptionist. “Buenos días, Luisa. ¿Cómo va tu día? ¿Ya llegó Irene?”

  “No, llamó para decir que iba a llegar tarde,” Luisa said. “Your Spanish is getting better.”

  “Is the boy they brought in downstairs?” Dani asked. The basement had a processing office, a holding facility, and a pair of interrogation rooms where suspects or witnesses could be questioned by the DA or by any of her investigators. A parking garage beneath the building afforded an area where prisoners could be brought in away from prying eyes or cameras.

  Luisa shrugged.

  “Was there a man here?” Dani asked. “Asking about the boy?”

  “¿Es muy guapo?” Luisa smirked when she saw Dani’s reaction. “I told him to ask downstairs.”

  Once the elevator door closed behind her, Dani couldn’t help glancing in the small mirror on the elevator wall. It was normal to want to look good, she defended herself, when greeting a friend you hadn’t seen in years. In her senior yearbook picture, taken before she’d gotten contact lenses, she looked like a bookish nerd trying hard not to look like a bookish nerd, with eyeglasses too big for her face and hair that really wasn’t working for her.

  Her cell phone rang just as the doors opened on the first floor, and she stepped out into the ground floor lobby to take the call.

  “Got a sec?” Beth asked.

  “Maybe that. What’s up?”

  “Grandpa Howard wants to come out for the Christmas holidays,” her sister said. Their Grandfather Howard lived in Libby, Montana, where he’d retired as a district court judge and spent most of his time fly fishing. “I’d like t
o tell him you have room, but I wanted to check with you first.”

  “Oh, Beth.” Dani tried to switch gears. “I mean, sure, if he wants to stay in a room that has no wallpaper.”

  “He can stay in my old room,” Beth said.

  “I stripped that one too.” She’d been trying to rehabilitate the house she’d inherited from their parents one room at a time, to get it ready to sell, though she wasn’t sure she really wanted to let it go. It was certainly more house than she needed, a four-bedroom French colonial with a gambrel roof, the clapboard siding painted a smoky mustard with sage green shutters. “I suppose, if he doesn’t mind.”

  “He won’t. Why don’t you just paint?” Beth said. “Or hire somebody. No offense, but the idea of you trying to hang wallpaper in a straight line isn’t working for me.”

  “I gotta go,” Dani said. “Tell Grandpa he can stay as long as he wants. By the way—guess who I might run into?”

  “Who?”

  “Guess.”

  “Dani … ,” Beth said impatiently.

  “Tommy Gunderson.”

  “Get out of town! Wow. You think you might fall in love with him again?”

  “I didn’t fall in love with him the first time,” Dani protested. “I freaked out.”

  “Yeah,” her sister said, “because you fell in love with him.”

  “I so did not.”

  “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it,” Beth mocked. “You know what I think? I think he dumped Cassandra Morton because he was still in love with the high school homecoming queen.”

  Dani should have known better than to tell Beth about it. As shocked and overwhelmed as Dani had been, first being nominated for homecoming queen and then actually winning the title, she’d been even more overwhelmed the night she was actually crowned. She’d pretended she thought it was all a big joke, but she wasn’t immune to the teenage need for peer approval and the craving for popularity. She’d been flattered to the point of blushing when she heard her name called, but that wasn’t it either. She’d held herself together as she took the stage, stood next to Tommy, and leaned forward, nodding her head so that the assistant principal could fasten the tiara to Dani’s prom-do. She’d taken the floor to dance the traditional Homecoming King and Queen dance with Tommy when, thrilled and embarrassed, she’d let him take her in his arms, and she’d looked him in the eyes, and seen him smiling at her from ear to ear, and she could have sworn that something …