Follow Me Down

by Sherri Smith

  You’re the only one I can trust. I trust you completely.

  p.s. Sorry again about being late. It’s really Mrs. Thompson’s fault—I’m working for her again. She’s never on time, and if I wasn’t making such good money working for her, I’d quit. (I didn’t know you two dated!)

  Mrs. Thompson. Carolyn! I leaned back into the couch. Joanna was working for Carolyn? She’d acted like she didn’t even know Joanna. Was this why Wyatt had seemed so squirrelly? Distancing himself from Lucas. They were involved somehow. The entry was dated the month before she went missing.

  Joanna’s last entry:

  I can’t wait for our St. Roche trip. Finally!!! My mom would kill me if she ever found out. Xo

  The “Xo” was etched in so deep, the paper bubbled around it like a burn blister. So Lucas really was sleeping with her. All of this was happening because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. I felt a stunning blast of anger, of plunging disappointment, you idiot turned into a minute-long mantra. How could he? How could he cross the line (and how many teenage girls did he cross it with)? Xo. St. Roche didn’t sound like a trip for paternity testing or an abortion. It didn’t sound like Lucas was pressuring her into going. The exclamation points made it sound like a happy outing. They’d planned on going to St. Roche. Then what? Plans fell through, so he lured her out to Dickson Park and killed her?

  I poured myself a drink to quell the itchiness to take something stronger and went through the journal again, cover to cover, three more times. I read for anything that might have hinted at something abusive going on between Lucas and Joanna. For that abused-wife whimper in Joanna’s writing, something that made her sound afraid of Lucas. But the only person Joanna sounded afraid of was her mother. Even the emotional slump that came after the assault was not addled with fear in the same way as when Joanna wrote about her mother (not that I didn’t think the hockey players couldn’t have done this, or that whoever was sick enough to pay them wasn’t capable of murder), but on nearly every page, Joanna referenced her mother with some level of anxiety. Dylan said Kathy wouldn’t let Joanna grow up. Kathy paid off Eric. Kathy caused an “accident” to befall Joanna’s BFF. She was a mother hen who’d rather suffocate her chick than let her out of the nest. And what was with all of Joanna’s injuries? My mom would kill me if she ever found out. Xo. Maybe this wasn’t some teenage hyperbole but literal.

  I felt a rush of guilt for thinking Lucas was a closeted psychopath. I was sorry for the Norman Bates comparison. I knew my brother. I did. He was my twin, and we could see right into each other with one look. Every time I played it out in my mind, it just didn’t work. It couldn’t work. It couldn’t be him.

  I downed the rest of my drink. Why did I keep doing this? Why did I keep placing his traits and childhood memories on a weighing scale? It was beyond logic; my brother was innocent. End of story. It couldn’t be him because it wasn’t him. He was guilty of sleeping with her, of poor judgment, of having a barely eighteen sexual predilection (even if Zoey was twenty-one she looked younger) but he did not kill Joanna Wilkes. Belief was a choice. I was choosing to believe he was innocent.

  I flipped through the journal again.

  Eric.

  Carolyn and Wyatt.

  Kathy.

  I had one answer at least. No wonder Lucas had hidden this.

  17

  I wanted to bust down Carolyn’s door. Her car was in the driveway, but no one was answering my machine-gun doorbell ringing. Curtains were drawn, and so far, no small faces had peeked out, but I could hear them. I called, and the phone trilled inside the house until it hit voice mail. I was about to leave when I heard a yelp and a splash. The backyard.

  I swung open the gate. It was lighter than it looked, and it smacked into the fence. The backyard was a long sprawl. Two girls in a sandbox startled and started crying. There were about nine kids, spread among two play structures and a kiddie pool.

  A teenage girl came jogging over. “Hello? Can I help you?” She was dressed in a bikini top and jean shorts. She looked around the yard, skittishly pulled out her phone, and tried to smile while also frantically texting.

  “Where’s Carolyn?”

  “Mommy’s not heeeeere,” one of Carolyn’s melatonin-starved kids screeched, his white-blond hair sticking up with what looked like hardened yogurt. I looked back at the teenage girl, who was still texting.

  “Where the hell is Carolyn?”

  “Bad word, bad word,” some kids chanted.

  “She just stepped out.” The girl finally looked up from her phone, startled. “Oh. I know you.” I took a step forward. She flinched, her hands formed into a shield. “I never wanted to say anything.” She moved toward the gate. “Carolyn said that we could help the police arrest Mr. Haas. Please don’t hit me.”

  “I am not going to hit you. Why would I hit you?” My head snapped back. A two-second daze in which things quickly stitched together in my head, and then I got it. “What did Carolyn tell you to do?”

  “I’m sorry, sorry, so soooorry.” The girl started walking backward out of the yard, then scampered barefoot down the driveway, like I was revving a chainsaw over my head. The other Haas twin knocking round town, looking to find another teenage girl to kill!

  “You can’t just fucking leave,” I yelled at her, but a passing plane muted my voice.

  “Bad word, bad word.”

  “Carolyn should be back any second. I’m sorry.” She called over her shoulder before disappearing down a walkway. So this was what Joanna must’ve been doing, babysitting Carolyn’s day-care kids, so Carolyn could go off and do what? My neck went stiff with tension. I rolled my shoulders. Looked up. Jet stream bisected the blue sky, like a cat’s eye glaring down on me. But it didn’t make any sense that no one else knew Joanna worked here. Parents would have seen her here at drops-offs and pickups. And even if Joanna made herself scarce during those times, the kids themselves would surely have mentioned her name at home? Especially with her missing poster plastered all over town.

  Maybe she just babysat Carolyn’s kids?

  I turned back toward the tiny tot chaos. Noticed in the far corner of the yard there was a shabby-looking hoop-style greenhouse. Something pulled at me. I waded through the sea of kids. “We’re not allowed over there,” a potbellied four-year-old girl screamed at me. The door was padlocked in three places. I cupped my eyes and tried to look inside, but the plastic wrap was milky white and heavily coated with dust. I couldn’t see anything definitive. I had a sudden movie-reel vision of Wyatt driving Joanna home after she’d been babysitting his kids. His sweaty hand moved from the shift stick to her thigh—why should Lucas have all the fun? He pulled into Dickson Park for some privacy. Carolyn was waiting back at home, knowing, hoping that her husband did something to Joanna so she could exact her twisted bitterness on Lucas. Guess your little teenage piece of ass isn’t so special. She handed it out to Wyatt. (It was like an anvil dropped on me: Carolyn could have paid the hockey players to humiliate Joanna. She would have known the boys through hosting season windups and team parties. But it didn’t turn out how she planned—she didn’t get the pictures.)

  Maybe Wyatt hit Joanna when she rebuffed his advances, and she died. He would call Carolyn. She’d come up and help him discard the body. At some point, Carolyn decided to cut Joanna’s hair. Maybe she planned to use it to taunt Lucas, to strategically place slender hanks of her hair in unexpected places (his desk at school, his truck, his apartment) to drive him mad. To show him she owned his ass. But then something better occurred to her. Why not send Lucas to jail for Joanna’s murder? Save themselves, and there in jail Lucas could never have another woman and would come to appreciate her visits. She changed her mind again; she rolled toward Wyatt’s white pimply back in the middle of the night and dozily announced, Let’s just kill Lucas too. And here he was, becoming fertilizer in this greenhouse.

  I dropped down onto my knees and worked at ripping the plastic up from the frame.

  “J
ayden hit meeeee.”

  I stopped, stomped back across the yard, and broke up a fight over a yellow plastic shovel, its handle now broken. Kept the shovel. At the greenhouse, I used the pointed end of the snapped shovel to stab into the greenhouse’s sheath and pull it up. I rolled in under the opening, between its metal ribs. Rows of potted marijuana plants. A grow-op hidden in plain sight. I walked up and down the aisles, looking for a bloody shovel, rubber gloves, red Nikes. And then I remembered something (funny considering what I was breathing in), the offer for a toke of some “original green Kush” by the kid who found Joanna’s body. Original green. Original sin. Eden. Eden Green. Carolyn. Wyatt and Carolyn were Joanna’s supplier, not Dylan. So Carolyn was hiring high school girls to help at her day care, then seeing if she could convince them to take up the more lucrative business of dealing weed? Except Joanna. She would have gone straight to selling pot because she didn’t want her mom to know she had a job (a job she went back to even after the pot was found in her locker). It’s really Mrs. Thompson’s fault—I’m working for her again. She’s never on time, and if I wasn’t making such good money working for her, I’d quit.

  This was what they were hiding? It was all so fucked up.

  A boy started whining frantically for juice, setting off a mini-riot. I tried to use the sugary sweet voice adults use when talking to preschoolers as I told the boy I’d find him some juice, but he eyed me suspiciously.

  An hour later, when Carolyn finally pulled into the driveway, I was coated in sticky residue, topped with a coating of sand. I heard the car and saw she was being dropped off by a bald man in shirtsleeves. She leaned over, quick, and kissed him on the lips. He smacked her tiny ass as she got out. Then she saw me.

  “What are you doing here? Where’s Kira?” She trotted into the backyard, did a quick head count.

  “She left about an hour ago. So this is your thing, huh? Get teenage girls to run your day care so you can run off and do whoever you’re doing?”

  “Oh God, Mia.” She cut me off. Flipped her hair over her shoulders. “It was an emergency; I wasn’t gone long at all.”

  “I’m sure the parents of all these kids would love to know their Precious Treasures are being watched over by only a sixteen-year-old without an adult on-site, while the person they’re paying to care for their children is getting her rocks off somewhere else.” Carolyn sniffed, looked the other way, like she couldn’t hear me. “Not to mention the grow-op you got going on over there.” I spoke up, using my best self-righteous voice.

  “It’s hardly a grow-op.” She rolled her eyes and scoffed. “Just some flowers for my garden, and yes, maybe I have a single plant, but it’s for personal use.”

  “Don’t bother, Carolyn. I looked inside. So how do you go about deciding which teen babysits and which one deals your weed? Do you give them an aptitude test or something?”

  “Leave, Mia. Get off my property.” She said this through clenched teeth, as she crept toward the sandbox and made cooing sounds at the sand castles.

  “I know Joanna Wilkes worked here, and I know she was selling your weed.”

  She stopped and backed away from the sandbox, but two of the kids had wrapped themselves around her legs like barnacles. “She came to me. Kathy Wilkes wouldn’t give her anything. Can you imagine? All that money, and they wouldn’t give her a dime. Joanna said she was saving for something.”

  “Saving for what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s none of my business.” She shook her kids off. “Probably to run off with your brother before he decided to kill her.”

  “Fuck off, Carolyn, you know Lucas didn’t kill her.” Baaad word.

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Then why are you making a teenage girl lie about Lucas molesting her?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Carolyn’s eyes went big and innocent. I wanted to shake her.

  “Yeah you do. The girl that was just here, Kira, she told me everything. She said she’s going to recant.” Not exactly true, but I needed leverage. “You know what I think? You heard the rumors that Joanna and Lucas were involved, and you were worried she told him that you were her supplier. You wanted to make sure he was arrested.”

  “Lucas killed that poor girl.” She said poor like a weepy Chicken Little. Even tossed her head back and looked up. “A girl that I came to know and care about. I was just so sick of seeing him around town, flaunting his twenty-year-old slut while Joanna was still missing. He still thinks he’s the town darling and that he can just do whatever he wants. Someone needed to wipe that smug grin off his face. Someone needed to push the police to try harder.”

  “So that’s it? The old college obsessiveness. It never went away, did it? Your stalker tendencies. You just couldn’t stand to see him with anyone else, even now?”

  “I am not going to ask you again. Leave.”

  One of her kids started chanting, “Watch-me-Mommy, watch-me-Mommy,” as he sat on top of the slide.

  Carolyn closed her eyes for a second too long, flared her nostrils. “I am watching, OK? Just go down the slide.”

  “For all I know, Carolyn, you killed Joanna. Maybe a drug deal gone bad? How big is your operation? A landscaping company is a pretty good front.”

  “I would never hurt that girl. How dare you? I am a mother.” Carolyn pounded her chest with her fist.

  “See how far that gets you with the police.”

  Suddenly Carolyn sunk down onto a child-sized bench and looked up at me with big eyes. Her yoga pants puckered out and exposed a lacy G-string. “You know what, Mia, I’m just trying to make ends meet here.”

  “Oh, OK. That’s fine, then. That totally justifies using teenage girls to sell drugs to minors and having them watch over your charges while you pick up ass on the side. Then, yeah, carry on.”

  “God, Mia, it’s not like I’m peddling meth. It’s weed. Please don’t say anything. Wyatt doesn’t know about any of this. There’s no operation. He wouldn’t. Our marriage has never been great. I won’t lie to you, I had feelings for Lucas for a long time, and I think Wyatt knew that. I didn’t come forward about Joanna working here because we need this money. I couldn’t risk losing the day care. Wyatt is so fucking bad at running the business.”

  I felt a sudden, brief, supernova burst of satisfaction. “I’m telling the police, Carolyn.” I turned to go. She got up and the bench turned over with a loud thud. The children in the yard went still as garden gnomes.

  “Well, I guess you were both bound to turn out fucked up, with your mom running all over town,” she taunted. I ignored her, but she followed me down the driveway anyway. “If you go to the police, you’ll regret it.”

  I swung back around. “Are you threatening me?”

  “How did you even know Joanna was selling my product,” Carolyn said this quaintly, like she was referring to homemade scented candles or baby blankets, “when no one else knows? Not even the police—and yet you know?” Her voice sharpened. “Did Lucas tell you? Because if he did, then I guess he really was doing her.”

  “This isn’t some game, Carolyn. This is my brother’s life that you’re fucking with.” She was right, though; she could say whatever she wanted. It wasn’t like I could bring out Joanna’s journal as proof.

  “I’m just saying, who’s going to believe you? Because you know what? This is what really happened here: you found out my employee was one of Lucas’s teenage victims because he told you about her. You came here to get her to recant. You attacked her. I have nine impressionable young minds in the backyard to back me up on this.”

  “Fine, Carolyn. Bring your posse of preschoolers down to the police station, then. They shouldn’t be here anyway when the police start busting up your greenhouse.”

  “I could get rid of everything before they ever got here, and Kira will quickly realize that no one wants to be known as the girl who lied about being molested. Trust me, once I’m done talking to Kira, she won’t recant a word.”

&nbs
p; An urge to unleash on Carolyn, body-slam her into the driveway, invaded me, but then I saw two toddlers weave out of the yard, through the open gate. I gestured at them with my thumb. “I can’t believe anyone lets you watch their kids.” Carolyn rushed over, corralled them back behind the gate and closed it, then stood up straight like nothing happened.

  “You need to leave. I’m working,” she said, without a sliver of irony in her voice. I made a psshht noise with my lips.

  “By the way”—I walked up the driveway toward her—“after Kira took off, I recorded the whole last hour on my phone, not a single child care worker in sight. Isn’t that child abandonment?” Not a bad idea—I wished I’d thought of it before. “Get those girls to recant, or else I’m going to the police with my video and calling every one of your Precious Treasures’ parents to tell them that their children are being watched by a sixteen-year-old while you’re out screwing some guy.”

  Carolyn bared her teeth in her signature mean-girl smile. “You’re so delusional. He did it. He killed her. Joanna was so moony over him.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I heard them talking on the phone.”

  “You have twenty-four hours.” Eyes burning, I retreated down the driveway.

  * * *

  I drove over to Abby Peters’s home, perched on the edge of my seat, feeling like a cross between a bumbling gumshoe and Liam Neeson. I had a list of names that I was going to see, that was my plan. When I called (the phone number was an easy find, thanks to a teenage disregard of safety on Instagram), Abby’s mother was more than happy to talk to me about Kathy—“Oh, yah, you come on by. That woman is a real bitch, doncha know.” (OK so some of us do have accents, and I was relieved I was hearing it again because that meant mine hadn’t returned.)

  She seemed not to even care I was the sister of an alleged murderer. This made better sense once I got there and realized she was the much older sister of one of my friends in high school. “It’s Jenny! Cheryl’s sister?”