Amanda arched away from him.“I’m not joking.”
I tried again.“Why do you think Lyall would want to kill us?”
For a long while, she looked at everyone, then she turned toward the front window of Dante’s, where a beautiful old wood Italian crèche sat on white gauze under a sky of tiny gold electric lights.There was an odd sort of stubborn defensiveness in her voice.“People in this room know the answer to that.”
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“What’s that supposed to mean?” As I asked Amanda the question, I was studying the familiar faces around the table.But they all looked, or pretended to look, equally puzzled by her remark.
“This whole thing is crazy.” Debbie angrily took the rings off her fingers, then shoved them back on.“I don’t know why you started it, Pudge.
Nobody killed anybody.Ben’s dead.I’m sorry.It was an accident.And Lyall’s dead.A long time ago.Is everybody going insane here?”
Pudge said he was almost sorry that he’d ever called this meeting.
“But somebody stuck death threats in Jamie’s door! I didn’t make that up.
And I think the police ought to find out who it was.”
“Those notes are somebody’s dumb idea of a joke.” Barclay pushed his expensive watch in Pudge’s face as if time itself were Pudge’s fault.
“You know what I can’t believe? I’m even wasting my time here.I was supposed to go to the Messiah with Tricia tonight.”
Debbie snorted, looking deliberately from him to Amanda.“Right, like you’re broken-hearted.You’re such bullshit, Barclay.”
Barclay flung himself back from the table, jabbing his arms through his elegant overcoat.“This is all totally insane.I’m out of here.Amanda, could I see you for a second?”
She turned her back on him.“Sorry, I need to make a phone call.”
Barclay left but Amanda didn’t make a phone call.
So, other than the Italian desserts, which everyone but Amanda ate, the evening had proved a complete bust.Everyone had talked a lot, but overall, I’d say the words most frequently spoken were insane and crazy. I had done my best.I wore my Olympic Magnum in a shoulder holster and took off my ski jacket so they could see the seriousness of the snub-nose.
I told them we all should be careful.I handed out copies of the notes I’d 1 4 0
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gotten, “Death has come to your little town, Sheriff” and “Was that the bogeyman? As a matter of fact ...it was.” I told them there was physical evidence at the Tymosz house that Ben’s accident had been rigged.
I also handed out copies I’d Xeroxed from the Death Books of various murders imagined by each of them during the three years of the Killing Club.I suggested they stay out of the situations they’d once created.There was uneasy laughter at the silliness of their old fantasy crimes: Debbie was going to lock the gym teacher in the steam room till she sweated to death.Amanda, who (unlike Debbie) enjoyed and excelled in sports, was going to kill any number of in-crowd girls any number of athletic ways that would look like accidents—a horse would kick them to death, an arrow would impale them, heavy free weights would fall on them, they’d be trapped under swimming pool covers and be choked by gymnast rings.Barclay was going to pass off the murder of his mother as a drowning.Pudge was going to boil Eileen’s father (who hit her) in the huge deep-fat doughnut vat at the local bakery.Connie was going to in-ject the basketball coach (who had diabetes) with an overdose of insulin.
There appeared to be little concern now that these same homicides could happen to their imaginers.But, then, did I actually think that any of the clever undetectable household accidents that I’d planned on carrying out against my high school enemies would be inflicted on me? Would a high-volt live wire fall on my car, a gas leak spread poison through my sleeping house, cyanide be “accidentally” ingested with my antihistamines? Did I really fear those, or half a dozen other sudden deaths? Not really.Then why should my fellow club members expect to be murdered?
Nor, as they certainly insisted, should they have plans to kill anyone else.
Why should Lyall Hillier want to do so either?
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Lyall had never talked much during Killing Club meetings at the playhouse; I remembered whole evenings of his sitting on the floor, his hands motionless on his crossed knees, without saying a word.He had a remarkable stillness to him.I could never decide what his stillness meant—that he was paralyzed with shyness? Exhausted by anxieties? Did he take as many drugs as he sold to his friends? Or was it just a kind of acceptance of his peripheral role in life, a contentment to watch?
After Lyall’s suicide, I figured that what he had accepted, for whatever unspoken reason, had been despair.Looking back, I’d seen in his eyes that he was hopeless; I’d just never paid attention.We didn’t know each other well; he was Garth’s friend.Garth’s shadow.
From childhood on, Lyall had been very thin, with long narrow features that made his jade-green eyes look larger and sadder.In high school, he wore a snake ring on his forefinger and a favorite corduroy jacket, the nutmeg color of his hair, that had a wide black plastic zipper and a decal of a Tour de France cyclist on the back.I remember that he often spoke about liking the bike-racing movie Breaking Away, and that Garth had referred to it at his memorial service—that Lyall had broken away from us.
When Amanda brought the gathering at Dante’s to a halt by saying that Lyall might be alive and that he had reason to be pissed at us, I assumed she meant that he felt his fellow “outsiders” in the club had let him down by not being more sympathetic and supportive, that he’d killed himself because of some failure in us to stop him.Over the years since his drowning, after I’d started to deal as a police officer with teens and narcotics, I considered the possibility that the dealers Lyall had been getting his stuff from had gotten rid of him.His file made it clear the police 1 4 2
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hadn’t fully pursued a homicide in relation to his death.The more likely possibilities were that he was a serious drug addict with a preexisting mood disorder—maybe he was bipolar—or that he was gay but had felt unable to come out, although there were plenty of openly gay kids in Hart High; they even had an official Gay and Lesbian Alliance and held meetings all the time.So I don’t know; he was an only child with older-than-average parents who kept to themselves; maybe he thought they wouldn’t be able to deal with a homosexual son.In the last Death Book, he had
“murdered” both his parents in some ingenious way—so perhaps he feared the news of his drug-dealing or addiction or his sexual orientation would kill them, or perhaps he really wanted them dead.
Amanda was the most dramatic, but not the first person to bring up the possibility that Lyall was still alive.Even at the time of his suicide, there had been speculation that he hadn’t actually jumped into the river, that the drowning was a hoax.It was definite that something had smashed through the thin ice spreading from the embankment over the dark fast current of Deep Port River, but in the beginning the idea had been raised that maybe it hadn’t been Lyall.It was just that no one had said it in a long time, not for a decade.The case was closed.
The morning after his disappearance, the police had found his overcoat with his wallet in it under a cinderblock on the old docks.In the wallet was a letter asking his parents to forgive him.The letter looked to be in his handwriting.Nearby on the river bottom, divers found a Bass loafer identified as Lyall’s.They didn’t find anything else in the right place on the river bottom that might have been used to make the jagged hole in the ice.Although his body was never recovered, the coroner ruled proba-ble suicide, concluding that Lyall had gone into the icy river on purpose.
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It was clear that, thin and coatless, he would have quickly succumbed to hypothermia as he was swept into the harbor by the outgoing tide.Fin
ally the conclusion that he was dead came down to—where else could he be?
If his mother and father clung to the hope that their son was playing some dreadful joke on them, they eventually gave up as well.Sure, it was possible to disappear completely.But, sadly, teen suicide was not uncommon.We had a memorial service.His parents put up a gravestone.
LYA L L H I L L I E R
1974–1992
Beloved Son
If he was beloved, he must not have felt it.The truth is, I’d sometimes thought he was in love with Garth.But then, who wasn’t?
Barclay’s outburst at Pudge and his storming off had ended the get-together just before midnight, with nothing settled and no one happy.
Pudge wouldn’t let us help clean up, though Connie insisted on carrying glasses out to the kitchen for him anyhow.Pudge was visibly upset, his face blotchy; maybe Connie wanted to give him a chance to talk about his disappointment that no one would take his fears seriously.
Outside, the holiday lights on the streets and the green had all been turned off.It was so dark that I couldn’t see the clock tower on the town hall.The stars looked small, far away and useless.As we walked toward her Jaguar, Amanda took my arm and surprised me again.“Jamie, I should have said something on the way here, because it’s really been bothering me, but all of a sudden it sounded so dumb.And we were talking for the first time like people, and ...”
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I stopped her.“About Lyall?”
“Maybe.Somebody’s been following me,” she said.“For weeks.That’s why I’ve been wondering if maybe Lyall isn’t really dead.” Somehow even fear, if that’s what it was—and that’s what it looked like—couldn’t disturb the perfection of her features.
“What do you mean, following you?” I stopped her as we moved onto the sidewalk.“Like stalking?”
“Sort of.In a car.Staying right behind me, speeding up and then slowing down when I do. Changing lanes when I do. Then when I get home, he drives away.I don’t get out of the car till he drives away.”
“God, Amanda.Why didn’t you tell me this? Can you identify the person? Or the car?”
She said the car had only followed her at night; she’d never seen the driver and really hadn’t seen the car itself well either because of the blinding lights, but she thought it was large and dark-colored.She said at first she’d dismissed her suspicion as just nerves after Ben’s death; later, she’d felt too foolish to mention it to others—afraid they’d think she was imagining things.“But I wasn’t, Jamie.Somebody’s deliberately creeping me out.But I don’t know who.”
I asked her if this had ever happened to her before.She said that it had, long ago, but in the past she’d assumed it was Shawn following her, out of jealousy.
“Now I know it wasn’t Shawn.And I’m a little scared.I got this.” She took a folded piece of paper from her very expensive handbag.It wasn’t pasted letters; it was a printout.But each word was big and in a different font.There was only one line on it, one I had heard before: “I hate a guy with a car and no sense of humor.”
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“Oh, Jesus.Where did this come from, Amanda, and how long have you had it?”
She’d found it this morning under her windshield wiper, in her garage.The Morgans didn’t lock their garage.Why should they? They lived on the good side of the river in an exclusive community of new six-thousand-square-foot McMansions circling a private golf course.She looked honestly baffled.“What does it mean?”
I told her it was a line from Halloween, just like the two notes left at my door.I didn’t know what it meant specifically.Maybe it meant something in the context of the movie, which I would watch again.Wearing gloves, I folded the note and put it in my jacket.Then I made a decision to tell Amanda about the bullet Danny and I had found in Shawn’s tire.
When I finished, she burst into tears.It was startling, a childlike sort of crying that didn’t fit at all with her flawless face.She was so upset that I found myself emphasizing to her that Rod agreed with the state patrol, who believed that the shooter had fired randomly, that no one was trying deliberately to kill Shawn.
“It’s still murder!” she said.
“Yes, it is.And the New Jersey State Police are investigating it now.It’s their case.”
Trembling, she dropped her keys; they were on a sterling silver ring I recognized from the Tiffany’s catalog.I picked them up, handed them back and she clicked the lock open on her Jaguar.
“Amanda, wait a minute.There’s a chance the same guy who shot at Shawn’s car is following you around now.It’s a real long shot, and I don’t want to scare you, but be careful, okay?” I gave her my card.“You get the slightest hint somebody’s following you again, you call my cell phone.”
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The whole time I was talking with Amanda, I was also considering the possibility that she was suckering me, just as she had Mary Beth O’Faolain, when she’d pretended so sympathetically to search for pearls she herself had stolen.Maybe she’d typed the note herself, lied about being followed.But why would she scam me? One reason could be that she had killed Ben, because he was going to confess to me that together they’d gotten rid of Shawn.Or maybe it had been only because she needed to distract me.After all, she was having an affair with Barclay, and since they were both married and both socially prominent, they wanted to keep it very quiet.
She interrupted.“So you don’t think there’s a chance Lyall is alive?”
“It seems pretty unlikely.” I asked her again what she’d meant by all her mysterious insinuations about Lyall’s reasons to be angry with the Killing Club.
“You need to ask other people about that.” She looked across the street, and said, “Oh, great.”
“What other people?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it, Jamie.” She opened her car door.
“I need to get to bed.I’m going riding very early.”
I saw that she’d been watching Barclay hurry across the street toward us from the end of the block.He must have been sitting in his car, waiting for her to come out.
Maybe Barclay himself was Amanda’s “stalker”—scared he was losing her to someone else.Or maybe some other man was following her around town to see if she was still seeing Barclay.Or maybe, and who could blame him, Jim Morgan had hired a private investigator to find out if his wife was cheating on him.Maybe Morgan’s P.I.was tailing her.
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Barclay reached us, grabbed Amanda’s arm and pulled her away, but not far enough, given the decibel level of his voice.“I need to talk to you.”
She flung off his arm.“It’s late.”
He pushed between us, ignoring me.His neck thickened as he grabbed at her again.“I don’t care what time it is, you bitch! You got what you wanted and now you’re dumping me? I don’t think so!”
She slapped him in the face.I’d actually never seen a woman slap a man before except in the movies.Barclay’s cheek immediately turned crimson.She stared at him for a minute.“I haven’t made mistakes like you in a long time.” Then she turned to me. “I’m very sorry, Jamie. Could you ask Pudge to take you home? Good night.” She slid quickly into the Jaguar and accelerated so fast, without even fully closing the door, that Barclay had to leap away.
Without speaking to each other, we both watched the blue car make the left turn just as the light went from yellow to red.
Barclay didn’t even look at me, just ran back down the street.Along the way, he furiously picked up a trash can and smashed it into a lamppost.Rubbish like soda cans and newspapers flew into the gutter.
A minute later the Mercedes turned right on River.I didn’t know whether he was trying to fool me by going in the opposite direction from Amanda or he really had given up for the night.
In the window of Dante’s I could see Pudge and Connie h
urry to the window to see what the noise had been about.Pudge had balled the green-checked cloth off the table into a heap that he hugged to his chest.
He was happy to drive me home.But I decided to walk instead.It wasn’t really that far to Dock and Fourteenth.No one walks much in Gloria anymore.I’ve known people to drive their cars a single block to pick 1 4 8
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up a pizza.Even at midnight there were a few people driving around in the center of town; maybe they’d stopped at Deklerk’s after Christmas shopping.The temperature was falling fast but I had a good enough pace going to keep warm.The streets got darker as I moved away from downtown.There were fewer lamplights, and some weren’t working.Most people had turned off their Christmas lights in the row house windows.
By Twelfth Street it was clear to me that there was a car cruising slowly after me, staying about two blocks behind.It was the first time, even after the anonymous notes, that I’d had the creepy feeling that the danger was personal, that somebody was out there, maybe Lyall, maybe someone unknown to me, plotting to murder all the members of the Killing Club, and right now, me.
When I’m scared, I fight.So now I spun around to face the car, but all I could see was its lights.The brights were on.When I turned toward it, the car stopped.Then when I resumed my walk, it followed.Stepping quickly back into an alley between two storefronts, I waited for the car to pass me.It didn’t.So, pulling out my gun from the shoulder holster, figuring I’d at least scare them, I ran toward the car as fast as I could, but the dark sedan went fast into reverse, backing into the dark intersection it had just crossed; it skidded on the side street and roared away.I couldn’t see the plates.I waited a while and then jogged the last two blocks home.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN I TOLD ROD what had happened as I was walking home, he asked if I wanted a squad car to check by my house every few hours.But by then I’d decided the driver was just some guy getting his kicks, trying to spook me, or hoping to pick me up or figuring 1 4 9
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