by J. Thorn
Claire shook off the memory, aware that Ted was looking at her.
"My sister," Ted said, pausing a moment to swallow. "She's in the hospital."
"Is she okay?"
He shook his head. "She and Stu were real close. Up until a few years ago, y'know, until Stu got too cool for it, they used to go horse riding together. She has a little ranch up in Delaware. When she heard what had happened, she shut herself up in her house. I dropped by yesterday and found the back door open. She was upstairs, out cold, an empty bottle of Scotch and a pill bottle beside her. She'd tried to kill herself."
"Oh God, I'm so sorry." A stone dropped in a pond, Claire thought, forever making ripples. And it would never stop. There was no bank for it to break against. Instead, like a shockwave, it would continue on until there was no one left to feel it.
"She's a good girl, Yvonne," Ted told her, picking at a patch of raw sore-looking skin under his thumbnail. "She loved Stu."
"Is she going to be all right?"
"Doctors say she'll be fine. I'm thinking maybe I should get her and Sally away for a while. Maybe take them on a cruise."
"That'd be nice."
"Yeah."
Claire smiled, but wondered if Ted knew the distraction didn't exist that was powerful enough to stop them from feeling what they'd lost. She guessed he did, that he was grasping at straws in an effort not to cave in on himself, and lose all he had left in the process. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying.
"How is Sally?"
He shrugged. "Holding up, best as she can I suppose. Worst thing is, she keeps coming to me to tell her everything's going to be all right, or to make sense for her of what happened, and I can't seem to find the words. Everything sounds...forced, as if I'm lying to her. But I'm not, you know? I just don't know what to say."
Claire did know. It was exactly what she was doing now with the father of her dead friend.
"There isn't much you can say," she said. "I still, even with everything that's happened, have trouble believing it."
Ted looked at her for so long she had to resist the urge to stand and busy herself with anything that would get her out from under his gaze. At length, he sighed. "I'm sorry for what they did to you."
In that moment Claire knew how Sally Craddick had felt, seeking comfort from her father only to suspect his words were empty. There was no emotion in his voice, and she wondered just how much this man hated her for coming back alive when his son had died a horrible death.
His hand found hers and his skin was cold. "Tell me," he said.
She looked at him, trying to read his will in the lines on his sallow face.
"Tell me how he died. Tell me what they did to my boy."
Images passed through Claire's mind, some of them taken from the photographs, others from the equally vivid vault of memory. She saw Stu standing on a jetty with Katy, him in black swim trunks, her in a cute peach-colored bikini, both of them wearing sunglasses as they posed, their skin beaded with water, hair wet from swimming. Then Stu drunk at the bar at the hotel in Sandestin, chatting up the barmaid, who looked completely uninterested, Katy sitting at a table with Claire and Daniel, all of them watching. Think I should tell her he has a tiny dick? Katy had said, and they'd laughed, but after several shots of tequila, she hadn't been able to disguise the hurt in her voice. Thank Christ for college next year, she'd added, raising her glass. No more men with the maturity of a dragonfly. Daniel had frowned at her, puzzled by the analogy, then laughed so hard he'd almost choked on his beer. They all had, the sound of it enough to draw Stu back from the bar. What's the joke? he'd asked, prepared to join in if he deemed it worthy. But then Katy's smile had vanished as she'd looked away and told him, You are.
"He tried to protect us," Claire told Stu's father. "He tried to fight them off."
This was a lie, but a necessary one. The truth would almost certainly destroy him.
"That's my boy," Ted said with pride, his eyes watering.
Claire smiled. He ran, she thought. He ran and left us there. Left Katy dead. Left Daniel and me to fight them on our own. He ran, and he might have made it if one of them hadn't been waiting for him in the woods.
"Did he...was it quick?"
"I don't know. They took us to different rooms, sheds, away from each other." But I saw them dragging him in, and couldn't see his face for all the blood.
Ted nodded gravely. "He was a brave boy, my son. I taught him to be a fighter. Told him he'd need to be, the way this world has gone."
Claire squeezed his hand. "He did all he could for us."
"Have you spoken to the other parents?"
"No. Not yet." The thought of it turned her stomach, and after this encounter, she decided she might not.
"They'll want to see you. They'll want to know what you know about what happened."
"Of course." But she knew none of them would want to know that, not ever. Not if they wanted the truth. She could not give them the peace they sought unless she lied to them as she had lied to Ted, because the end, what she'd seen of it, had not been pretty, or dignified or heroic, and that wasn't what they wanted to hear. The deaths of their children had been horrendous, violent, and messy.
"Did he say anything?" Ted asked.
"What?"
"Stu. Did he say anything before...?" He shook his head. A tear ran down his unshaven cheek.
"He was happy," she said. "He was with Katy, and they were in love."
This sounded utterly false, but Ted smiled slightly. "Good. That's good. I liked Katy. She was a nice girl."
"Yes she was." Claire felt her throat constrict as the memories assailed her. How many times had Katy sat on this very bed with her, discussing their ambitions, their fears, laughing like idiots over something that might not have been that funny until Katy let loose her strange oddly manlike laugh, which would set Claire off every time she heard it? She recalled the night Katy had slept in the bed with her, wracked by sobs as she confessed that she had missed her period and was deathly afraid she was pregnant. If I am, she'd moaned, it wont be Stu's. We haven't slept together in over four months. Claire had held her, told her it would be all right, and it had been. Katy wasn't pregnant. Six months later she would say those same words as she held her on the road to Elkwood, her friend's blood pooling around her. Except it hadn't been all right, not then, and now Katy was dead, her body cut up into pieces and scattered in poor Doctor Wellman's basement.
"I think I need to move," Ted said. "I think I need to get out of this town."
Claire said nothing. Had Stu died at home, moving away from the scene and the awful memories they conjured up might not be such a bad idea. But Stu had been murdered miles away from there, in some place he'd never been before, a place Ted Craddick had never, and likely never would, see with his own eyes. The worst of the pain would be inside Ted's own mind, and there was no moving away from that. The agony would follow him no matter where he went.
Abruptly he rose, releasing her hand. "I'm glad you're okay," he said again. "And I'm sorry about what happened to you, and my boy, and your friends. It's not right." He lowered his gaze to the floor. "It's not right what happened to you." His winced as if the tears that were now flowing freely scalded him. Then his face relaxed and he tried to smile. "He never said anything but good things about you," he told her and Claire guessed maybe that was Ted's own untruth. She and Stu had had their share of run-ins, the unavoidable result of personalities too dissimilar to ever fully jibe. They'd both been stubborn, unwilling to back down, a stalemate seldom helped by Claire's protectiveness toward Katy, who Stu had frequently hurt, whether he meant to or not.
"I loved him," she told his father. "They were my life."
She half-expected him to say, "A life you still have," and spit on the floor as he stormed out, but instead he nodded, and put a hand on the door. He was almost in the hall before he turned, looking more troubled than she'd yet seen him. "Has Danny's brother been to see you?"
"No."
"He will," Ted told her. "He's calling on all the parents, and he mentioned wanting to see you too."
"Why?"
A curious look passed over the man's face. It was almost relief. "It's better if he explains it to you himself."
Any further questions she might have asked died in her mouth as he exited the room. She heard him talking to her mother as she escorted him downstairs, then he was gone, and once more the house was quiet.
*
In the photo album, beside a picture of Daniel in his football uniform, was a scrap of yellow notepaper riddled with creases. On it was written his cell phone number and beneath that, his barely legible scrawl tangled into the words "Call Me!"
Claire smiled and ran a finger over the clear plastic sheet holding it in place beside the photograph. In her old life, the happy, unthreatening one she'd known before the men had taken it from her, she'd been a packrat. There were no empty spaces in her room, and her closet was filled with old boxes, each of them containing memories and keepsakes from her years spent wandering through the minefield of teenage life. There were rolled up posters of football games, victories made memorable by the mischief perpetrated later beyond the sidelines. There were ticket stubs and receipts, kept to remind her of special moments with old boyfriends, most of whom she still cared for in some small way, but seldom thought about anymore. Pennants and flyers, old high school and even middle school notebooks, branded with scribbles of trivial significance now, but which had had monumental import back then; love letters from nervous young boys on the threshold of puberty; report cards which had earned her $50 a piece from her father, allowing her to save up and be the first of her group of friends to own a car; the police report of the drunk-driving incident that had seen that car totaled; video cassettes of long gone birthdays and Christmases her mother had wanted to throw away after her father died, too pained by the memory of his prominent role in them; brochures from vacations with her family, getaways with Daniel and her friends; the audio CD Daniel had given her of love songs for Valentine's day. She hadn't cared for most of the songs, but had appreciated the sentiment.
And of course, there were the photo albums.
She looked at the slip of paper bearing Daniel's cell phone number and felt a tightening in her throat.
Then she thought of Muriel Hynes, and though her face was hard to recall, Claire remembered she'd been a mousy, shy girl with glasses, lank brown hair, and a prominent overbite. She remembered feeling sorry for the girl, then being ashamed that she had. It was not her place to pity anyone, and by doing so was subconsciously assuming herself on a higher position on the social ladder. But as wrong as it felt to think it, she realized it was true. Claire had always been popular, blessed (and often cursed) with long blonde hair, generous breasts, and a trim figure. It had made her passage through high school much easier for the most part, despite the disdain her appearance and the company she kept instilled in the other cliques. The Goths had viewed her as a stuck-up rich girl, though she'd been neither. The art students and rockers had sneered at her as if though one day she might provide them inspiration for their work, they wouldn't be seen dead with her. The "nerds" worshipped but never dared approach her, conscious of their appearance and the stigma long-associated with the intelligent. Among them had wandered the painfully demure Muriel Hynes, but only for one semester. By the next, she'd already been interred in Oak Grove Cemetery after slashing her wrists in the bathtub. She'd been dead for over four hours before her father kicked in the door and found her.
Claire looked down at her own wrists, at the angry red lines carved into the flesh, and thought of Muriel, of the picture hanging in the hall at school. The girl in the portrait was smiling, but only just, as close to an imitation of the Mona Lisa as Claire had ever seen. In that moment, forever frozen in time, it seemed as if Muriel had been privy to knowledge that the Goths, for all their posturing and claims to the contrary, didn't know: Living is hard; Death is easy. And there are no answers on either side.
The night of Muriel's funeral, Claire had booted up her computer, logged on to the Internet and checked her old email folder until she found what she was looking for. It was the one and only communication she'd ever had from the dead girl. Eight weeks before her suicide, the girl had written to Claire with one odd simple message: "I like ur hair." Confused, Claire hadn't written back, but that night, as she reread those four words in an attempt to derive some greater meaning from them, some hidden significance that might help her understand why Muriel had taken her life, she wished she had. And then a strange and not entirely pleasant thought had occurred to her as she looked from the message to the girl's email address.
What if I answer now?
And even more unsettling: What if she replies?
The uneasiness these thoughts summoned had been enough to make her shut down the computer in a hurry.
Now, looking at the picture of Daniel, and the number scrawled on that small piece of paper—Call Me!—it came to her again.
What if I called?
What if he answered?
She struggled to remember what had become of Daniel's cell phone during the attack. Panic had blinded her, of course. She'd only been aware of the impossibility of what was happening, sure, right up until Katy was stabbed, that it had all been some kind of sick joke. She did not recall seeing Daniel reach into his pocket for his phone, and later, did not see their attackers take it.
But she'd heard it ringing.
In her prison, as the strength tried to leave her, consciousness flickering like a candle flame in a draft, she'd been pulled back into the cold horror of her circumstances by the distant sound of a computer circuit's attempt to replicate Mozart's "Symphony Number 9"—the familiar sound of Daniel's phone as someone tried to call him. Then his agonized scream had drowned it out.
Claire peeled the protective plastic away from the page of the photo album, and gently removed the yellow slip of paper. She held it in her trembling hands for a moment, then looked at the photograph of her dead boyfriend.
I loved you, she said. Did you love me?
She had only memories from which to draw an answer, but even they betrayed her, for Daniel had never told her he'd loved her, and so she would never know.
Unless she asked.
She turned her head.
The phone, girly pink like the rest of the room, sat on her nightstand, silent.
Don't be silly, she cautioned herself. This is madness. It won't do anything but aggravate the pain. She smiled grimly at that. She could not imagine a pain worse than this, no suffering worse than that of the sole survivor.
She pushed the photo album aside, eased herself across the bed, and picked up the phone, then set the number beside it, under the tasseled pink lampshade.
Her heart began to race.
What am I doing?
Carefully, breath held, she dialed.
The digits, registering as dull beeps in her ear.
Silence. The faint hum of the connection racing through space, running through wires. Then silence again. Time seemed to stretch interminably.
Stop now while you still—
A crackle, a click...
Then the connection was made.
Claire's stomach contracted. She thought she was going to be sick. Bile filled her mouth as panic seized her.
Stop this. Stop this now, oh Jesus what am I doing?
Beep beep. Silence.
Beep beep. Silence.
She imagined the sound of Mozart, playing his music with none of the beauty or fervor or passion it had been written to convey.
She imagined hearing it out there in the night, a thousand miles away and yet still audible, carried to her by her desperate need to hear it, to know her boyfriend was alive and would answer at any moment.
Beep beep. Silence.
Then Kara at the door, gently easing it open, her look of concern quickly turning to curiosity as she stepped inside.
"Claire?"
; No. Go away.
Beep beep. Silence.
"Claire? Who are you calling?"
"No one. I'll..."
Kara approached her, slowly, but urgently.
It will ring out, Claire knew. I'll hear his voice on the message service and it will kill me.
But what she heard was: Beep beep. Click.
She felt every hair on her body rise, began to tremble uncontrollably.
Kara: "What's wrong?"
From the phone, silence, but it was not dead, not empty.
Someone had answered.
Someone was listening.
-19-
Despite the fact that he was in his late fifties and had recently buried his only daughter, the man who answered the door was well dressed and healthy looking. He wore a light blue shirt with the top button unfastened, and a pair of dark pants, the creases sharp above a freshly polished pair of shoes. His dark hair had been recently barbered, and was streaked with gray, which made him look distinguished rather than old.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Mr. Kaplan?"
A curt nod. "Who are you?" He looked slightly annoyed as he appraised the man on his stoop, as if Finch had pulled him away from an important business meeting or a football game.
"My name is Thomas Finch."
"Finch?"
"Daniel's brother."
Anyone who believed the theory that death forged a bond between those left to grieve had obviously never met John Kaplan. With a sigh he stepped back into the hall. "I suppose you want to come in?"
"I won't take up too much of your time," Finch said and entered the house.
Everything about the Kaplans spoke of money: from the gleaming silver Mercedes in the driveway and Tudor house set at the end of a long winding flower-bordered drive, itself a half-mile from the main road, to the sprawling yards, which looked vigilantly maintained, as if Kaplan feared his competitors would take the first trace of overgrowth as a sign of weakness. And then of course, there was John Kaplan himself. As he led him through a short, oak-paneled hallway with polished floors, Finch detected an air of intolerance about the man, as if he reserved his interest only for people who could benefit him or his bank account. He wondered if what he had come to say might change that, but then for a man supposed to be grieving, Kaplan looked awfully composed.