Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella

by King, Laurie R.

  “Get anything?” Al asked.

  “No. The only DNA was hers.”

  “So she probably didn’t have sex that night.”

  “Not unless she showered after. Or used a condom. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of time between when she’d left her party and when she hit that tree.”

  “Tell me about the party,” I asked.

  “It was just some get-together. Kids, you know?”

  Al and I held our silence. Belmonte’s expression became increasingly uncomfortable.

  Finally, he sighed. “Tell you the truth, after all this time I couldn’t say exactly where it was or who was there. But it would have been some of the kids from north-town. The Mayor’s daughter was about that age, and she went through a pretty wild patch. Not that you’d know it now,” he added, trying for a rueful chuckle.

  “And you didn’t want to put the town’s rich kids on record, for holding a party that ended with a death.”

  “The party had nothing to do with it. She wasn’t drunk, so there were no liability issues. But yeah, if we’d done formal interviews, it would’ve made the papers, and raised a stink about under-age drinking and kids left alone. The boy she’d borrowed the car from—name of Cardone—was a good kid, and his mother was on the City Council. She and a couple other mothers came in the next day and had a little talk with the chief, and after that he told me to close it up. If I’d had any real doubts, I’d have made a stink, but I interviewed the boy myself, and I could see how broken up he was. He ended up quitting school, joined the Marines, died in the Gulf War with a bronze star and a purple heart.

  “Anyway, I kept things open for a day or two, so I could ask around, but I couldn’t find any reason to dirty the reputations of a bunch of kids who’d done nothing worse than have a party with beer. Probably not how we’d do it today, but then? It happened.”

  “Except it didn’t,” I said. “From the dates in the report, you were working the case for at least two or three weeks. Why?”

  He exhaled, and looked up at me. “Because I wasn’t really satisfied. That it was an accident. And I wanted to know. I had a daughter two years younger, who was going through some trouble of her own.”

  “You thought maybe Patty committed suicide,” I said.

  “To be honest we all did. But it bugged me that I couldn’t get a hold on why. I mean, yeah, she was having problems at home and school, but no more than any kid. And she seemed to have friends, and she was bright, she’d been talking to the school counselor about college. She wasn’t pregnant. I couldn’t find any of the obvious signs.”

  “So you went looking for some of the less obvious signs,” Al finished.

  “And I couldn’t find any. So I decided it really had been a sad accident, and I let it go. Signed off, packed it away, let them haul the car to the junk yard.”

  “But it was years later that you sent her underwear in to the lab,” I objected. “That doesn’t sound much like letting go.”

  “Oh, that was something else entirely. We had a serial rapist working the area in the mid-nineties, and I thought maybe she’d been one of the early cases, so I included hers in with a couple of others. It was a stretch, and like I say, nothing came of it.”

  I looked over the table at Al, to see if he had anything else, then reached to gather the papers back into the folder.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more,” Belmonte said.

  “Think about the names of those kids at the party,” Al suggested, his voice making it almost a command.

  “I’ll see what I can come up with,” the other man agreed, an unspoken acknowledgment that it was wrong not to have put them into the record in the first place.

  Al and I drove in silence back toward town, busy with our own thoughts. As the outskirts appeared, he spoke.

  “You think the evidence locker here will be off-site?”

  “The building’s big enough, they might have it all under the same roof. You think we should go hunting?”

  “Well, they did keep the basic file, they might have hung onto the box as well.”

  “You want to do that?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Sure—but I’d also like to see if I can come up with any names, from the time Patty was here. People who might remember her.”

  “School yearbooks?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Divide and conquer? We could even be home for dinner.”

  Al Hawkin: eternal optimist.

  I pulled into a space in front of the police department, and handed Al the keys. “If their evidence locker is elsewhere, you might need the car. Text me when you’re done. If I haven’t heard from you, I’ll meet you here.”

  “I can drive you up to the school,” he protested.

  “Thanks, but I was hoping to avoid that particular hell.”

  VIII

  High schools are touchy about the whole privacy thing. When cops show up at their door, principals tend to expect warrants and explanations and usually end up kicking the decision up the ladder to the district offices, and days go by.

  But in a small town, the public library can be a source of everything from genealogical research to ESL classes. And the thing about public libraries is, they’re public.

  The face of this one had not changed since my earliest memories, although the sleek new wing tacked onto the back suggested something considerably more modern inside.

  And yet when I walked up the ramp where the old building had only stairs (the Carnegie libraries not having been saddled with ADA compliance) and pushed open the doors, I might have been ten years old again.

  Wooden desk, varnished wood floors, dark stacks—even the smell of it! I stopped dead in surprise, which caught the eye of the librarian behind the desk. I gave him an embarrassed smile.

  “Good morning,” he said. “Help you with something?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, continuing on as if my feet knew where they were going. Which they did, a little, although the card-catalogue was now a series of computer monitors.

  In a few minutes, I was in the reference section looking at two and a half shelves filled with Diamond Lake High yearbooks. The spines grew taller, thicker, and brighter as they traveled from top left to bottom right. To my relief, the 1980s were mostly complete. I carried 1981 to 1984 to a nearby table.

  I had graduated in 1981, so naturally I opened that one first. God, we were young and stupid looking. Artificial smiles, big, shiny hair down to the eyebrows for both sexes, boys in thick neckties and girls in huge turtlenecks. Glasses so big they might have had wipers attached. And everyone so white—which they weren’t, not that I remembered, but looking more closely, I discovered that the black-and-white printing made Hispanic kids look pale and African-Americans look Hispanic.

  And here was Katarina Martinelli, smiling out from the Senior Class section with absolutely no idea what life had in store for her. A few pages later, among the grid of smaller Freshman photos, was Patricia Martinelli: shy, clean-faced, in a shirt Mother must have chosen for her. When I flipped to the index at the back, I found only that one page number—but the name above her had two: Katarina “Casey” Martinelli also appeared on the solitary double-page display of girls’ sports (compared to—I counted them—the twenty-one pages of boys’ teams, from football to golf.) And most of the girls’ photos were action shots showing a lot of leg.

  God bless Title IX, I thought, though it took a long time to make itself felt. I pushed away my graduating year and pulled up that for 1982, Patty’s second year at Diamond Lake High.

  Again, the index had a single number next to her name, her formal Sophomore class portrait. I remembered the picture, probably because Mother had raised such a stink over it: Patty in raccoon-mask makeup, her hair teased and sprayed into a sculptured mound.

  After a bit I leafed through other pages: stage productions, marching band, a class with its heads bent over desks, a chemical formula on a blackboard.


  Reluctantly, I closed its covers and reached for 1983.

  Patty’s Junior-year picture was set apart from her classmates inside a black square. “In Memoriam” it said, with her dates and a bit of Khalil Gibran so trite I could just hear her snort of laughter. The photographer hadn’t been able to coax a show of teeth out of her, and had settled for an expression he’d probably taken for a smile, but which I recognized as my sister’s oh-you-idiot look, used for everyone from a scolding teacher to an irritated sister to—increasingly—a mother attempting to regain control.

  She wore less makeup than she’d gotten away with in 1982, though still more than most girls on the page. She also faced the camera straight-on instead of that coy tip-of-the-head pose everyone else had been placed in. I know what I’m doing , her picture said. Just don’t get in my way.

  After a minute, I turned to the index, expecting nothing but that single formal portrait. Patty was not a joiner, which left out the drama, French, debate, and Pep clubs, and she’d turned her back on sports, so no Martinelli in her year of Girls’ Softball—but I was surprised to find two more page numbers next to her name: one in an art class, the other among the crew in November’s stage production of Music Man , painting a backdrop.

  Art: of course.

  The in-class photograph showed her alone, hair over her face as she bent over a sketch pad, framed by an out-of-focus room scattered with easels: an artsy depiction of Student at Work. The group shot was posed but more natural, and included three other girls. The two on the left had the scrubbed, wholesome look of cheerleaders. On the right were Patty and a tall blonde dressed in a polka-dot shirt and the kind of pants that could only be called “slacks.” The caption gave her name as Lisa Ferraro—Italian, though she looked like an early Princess Diana, while Patty at her side might have been a high school-aged Siouxsie Sioux.

  Unlikely as it would seem, my short Goth sister and the tall Princess Di-wannabe were grinning at each other like—well, like sisters, in front of their painted backdrop of a small-town library.

  I wrote down the various names and took photos of the pages, then checked the index for any other appearances of Lisa Ferraro, since any girl who got that kind of expression out of my sister might know what Patty was up to, those final weeks of her life. There were no other citations of her name, but in the 1984 volume, I found Lisa Ferraro twice: among the Seniors, and again with the theater program. Did she look sad, having lost her friend Patty the previous year? She looked older, certainly. She was growing into a considerable beauty.

  I’d noticed, paging through, that most of the group shots didn’t bother with names. It might be worth a more methodical look.

  I started with the embossed and gilded 1981. Its first half-dozen pages were in color, before reverting to the cheaper black and white. I ran my eyes over the images of innocence past, a community so young it thought parents were there to protect, that futures were open, that old was a place they’d never visit.

  Had the school ever looked that welcoming, I wondered? Had our faces actually been that innocent, the teachers that friendly? Pictures lied, of course. Like this kid, shown helping a teacher set up for an after-school event: he’d been expelled for weekend vandalism. And that teacher there, showing a student how to adjust her microscope—wasn’t he the one who’d been arrested for selling cocaine a few years later?

  Or were those all glitches in the mental filing system? How would I know about the later scandals of Diamond Lake, anyway? Did I ever write to any friends? One or two classmates might have looked me up in Berkeley, on their way out to the bigger world, but I couldn’t have told you their names. No, most of my life before my twenties—before I met Lee—was nothing but wisps and impressions.

  I did possess a certain body-memory of Diamond Lake High: a corridor outside Spanish class that overlooked the parking lot; an English class I’d liked, around a corner from the main quad; the art lab there, the gym here. And when I pored over the images of my classmates, the occasional face or name carried a sort of memory of memory, as people I had known once upon a time. A few clear events did step out of the mist: here, for example, was the British exchange student who’d inadvertently convulsed the class by asking her neighbor if she could borrow his rubber. And wasn’t that the cheerleader who’d burst into the restroom in mortified tears, when someone pointed out that her white jeans were now red about the crotch? And that boy, there—surely I’d seen his face above a trash-bin, stuffed there by some bonehead jocks?

  The common thread here seemed to be humiliation, which made sense: humiliation was the currency high school students used to buy their way up the social ladder.

  And as if the reflection served as a court summons, I turned the page and felt a jolt of electricity jerk me in my chair. Jesus, how could I have forgotten him ?

  Big, good-looking kid in a letterman jacket, whose every pore shouted family money. Football? No, track. Blue eyes, black hair, six foot, wearing a wry grin that showed teeth from an orthodontist’s gallery, the tilt to his head asking, Am I not the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen?

  The kind of kid who just can’t believe the world doesn’t want to fall in either behind him (the male half) or beneath him (the females). The kind of kid who can’t quite understand the word No . Who takes refusal as a game, a challenge, an invitation.

  I checked the section: these were 1981’s sophomores. Two years behind me, but his size, athletic skill, and family money made him the natural-born king of Diamond Lake High. I, on the other hand, had been so far down in the Diamond Lake social hierarchy that it took him until the very end of my senior year to notice me, and add me to his game. Not that he’d slept with all his conquests—we all knew that he saved actual sex for the gorgeous few, rather than risk his reputation by sleeping with the dogs. It was the girls’ acknowledgment that counted. As soon as a girl flirted back, showing that, sure, she might be interested, he’d drop her. Publicly, with a scornful laugh and a mental check beside her name.

  Or an actual check, for all I knew.

  In any event, he got around to Casey Martinelli a few weeks before graduation, and paused by the bench where I was eating lunch to perform his male-cockerel strut—only to be stunned when I gave him a glance and went back to my book.

  Most young men faced with rejection would make some jokes about frigidity, and start a rumor about lesbian tendencies, then go on to other victims. Not this one.

  Instead, he’d doubled down, in a way even the most insecure and naïve girl, in an age before the dangers of stalking came to light, would find first creepy, then threatening. School became a constant offensive (in both senses of the word) with charm and jokes and physical proximity. I kept my face down, avoided him when I could, and counted the days, trying not to think about how his friends had started to snicker and the rest of the school was taking note.

  How could I have forgotten this? Well, I’d managed to leave behind everything else from Diamond Lake—and I suppose that this early male pushiness just sort of faded into all the years of lesbian insult and attitude. But still…

  As I studied that gloating face, I realized that here was another foundation piece of my past. The episode itself had retreated behind the wall I’d built in front of childhood, but its lesson remained, the knowledge that some apparently normal people do not recognize normal limits. That I needed to be a little watchful, always, for the individual who couldn’t let go, who simply had to win, no matter the cost. That a cop’s job was to stand up and say, Enough .

  I doubt he ever intended to rape me. If they’d been older, if it had been later in the night, if he’d happened across me alone, maybe—but as a gang, he and his friends weren’t drunk enough for real trouble.

  No, what he wanted was domination. To force a kiss and push his hand inside my clothes, gestures of strength that would let him cross my name off his list. But he chose a poor setting, when he and his friends happened to spot me walking home after dark and drove around the bloc
k.

  There were four of them, piling out of the car at the far end of the alleyway we all used as a short-cut. The road behind me had traffic, if I’d wanted to try and outrun the track star; the houses around me had lights, if I wanted to scream for help. Either would admit defeat, declaring him the winner. And yes I was frightened, but I was also a senior, with the freedom of leaving Diamond Lake in my nostrils, and I was sick and tired of the idiotic routine my friends and I had put up with, all those days of being pushed and touched and teased and laughed at until we let him take what he wanted.

  The two impulses warred against each other as I watched the four boys spill out of the car and come sauntering down the alley, waiting for their prey to turn and run.

  Fuck , I thought. Oh, shit .

  I didn’t turn. Instead, I moved sideways, over to a collection of builders’ waste that I’d walked past every day for weeks. I threw off my backpack and grabbed a scrap length of galvanized pipe—thinner, but about the same length as a softball bat. I stepped away from the wall, and took a couple of practice swings, my heart pounding so loud I could barely hear the chorus of mocking noise my bravado raised.

  The pack’s hoots and catcalls were loud enough to draw attention from the neighbors, but it was also a challenge, egging their leader on. And he had no choice but to meet it.

  They stopped laughing when he hit the ground. If they’d been drunker, it might have ended badly, for me and for some of them. They were just sober enough to look at the blood spattering his pristine Letterman jacket and call it quits, half-carrying him to the car.