Megan pulled a tube of lipstick from her bag and stood in front of the dresser mirror. Zoe watched as Megan spread it on her lips. When she was done Megan passed the tube to Jen who leaned forward and, with lips drawn back, began awkwardly tracing her mouth in bright red.
“Sweet!” Megan gushed at Jen’s handiwork. She handed the tube to Zoe.
Zoe shook her head. “No, thanks.ˮ Her parents wouldn’t let her wear any makeup, let alone use someone else’s lipstick. Besides, she was already in enough trouble at home.
“Too bad you can’t go to the movie with us today,” Megan said, blotting her lips on a tissue. “And all because of that stupid Billy Spitzballs.”
“Yeah,” Jen agreed, faking a shudder. “He’s such a loser.”
“Like, he could have gotten us all written up on the bus,” Megan said, putting the tube of lipstick back in her bag.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Zoe said. “He’s probably not all that bad.”
Megan stared at Zoe as if just noticing her for the first time. “Are you dissing me? You can’t really like that little geek.”
Zoe felt her face redden.
“Ooooh. I think Zoe has a crush on Spitzballs.”
“I do not,” Zoe protested.
“Zoe’s in love with Billy,” Megan chanted in a high-pitched mocking tone. “Zoe’s in love with Billy.”
Jen laughed. “No way! Not Billy Spitz.”
Zoe was saved by a knock at the door. Mrs. Lee entered carrying Jen’s younger sister Karma in one arm and balancing a plate of sandwiches made with huge slabs of whole grain bread in the other hand. She was wearing a long denim skirt and a tie-dyed t-shirt. Her straw-colored hair was pulled back in a loose braid. “I know it’s early for lunch,” she said, “but I thought you might like something to eat.ˮ She set the plate on the dresser and turned to Zoe. “I’m so sorry about your loss,” she said. “But your aunt is in a better place now.”
Zoe looked up at her hopefully. “You mean like Aunt Grace is in heaven or where good people go after they die? Is that what you mean?”
Mrs. Lee smiled. “Not exactly. Death is an illusion.ˮ She made a wide gesture with her arms. “Your aunt is still here. In the clouds, in the flowers, in the rivers—and in you.”
Zoe’s eyes widened. “In me?” She had heard about people being possessed by ghosts or spirits, and from what she had heard it wasn’t usually a pretty picture. She pressed her hands to her chest. It didn’t feel any different, but then ghosts, she supposed, weren’t something you could feel with your hands.
Mrs. Lee laughed softly as though having a ghost living inside of you was the most wonderful thing in the world. “Yes, in you.” She sat down beside Zoe and crossed her legs. “You see, Zoe, we all live on in our children, in our nieces and nephews. What we do, our relationships with our loved ones and with other people, lives on. It’s called karma.”
“Karma?”Zoe glanced over at Karma who was trying, without much success, to climb up on Jen’s bed.
Mrs. Lee smiled again. “Yes, karma. It’s like the ripples on a pond. The effects of our actions live on even after the pebble has sunk to the bottom and disappeared.ˮ She leaned forward and gently tapped her finger on the center of Zoe’s chest. “So you see, your Aunt Grace is still very much with you and very much alive in you—in your actions and the decisions you make.”
Zoe was not quite sure what ripples had to do with anything, or how Aunt Grace could still be alive in her if she was dead. But she didn’t want to say so and appear foolish for not knowing about these things. Instead, she smiled politely and thanked Mrs. Lee.
Mrs. Lee stood and took Karma’s hand. “Just let me know if you want to talk more about it sometime.”
“Okay,” Zoe said. Even though she knew she should probably feel privileged to be possessed by such a saintly ghost as Grace, she felt a bit spooked by the thought of having her aunt knocking around inside her.
“And clean up your face before we go to the movies,” Mrs. Lee said to Jen as she closed the door behind her.
Megan rolled her eyes and made little circles in her hair with her finger. “Whoa. What’s she been smokin’?”
Jen sighed. She took half of a hummus and bean sprout sandwich then put the tray of sandwiches on the floor next to them.
Zoe took a sandwich and bit into it. She made a face and set it back down on the plate.
“Hey, did you hear about them finding weed—you know, marijuana—on that girl at Classical High in Providence?” Megan asked. “Like, how stupid can you be taking it to school in your backpack?”
Jen winked and gave Zoe a sideways glance. A few years ago, Jen had told Zoe she had seen her parents smoking marijuana in the small barn out back. Jen had also told her that her parents were growing “tomato”—a.k.a marijuana—plants under grow lights out there. That was before her mother had become a Buddhist and given up all “intoxicants.ˮ The “tomatoˮ plants disappeared about the same time.
Zoe smiled. They could trust each other with their secrets. It was different with Megan. You could not tell her anything. Even though she would swear on her grandmother’s grave that she would not tell, she’d blab it all over school the next day. Zoe figured she couldn’t help it—that’s just the way she was made.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Megan asked, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Is there something I should know?”
“Uh—I was just wondering,” Zoe said, “I mean—what ever happened to her?”
“Who?”
“You know—that girl who had the marijuana in her backpack.”
“Who cares?”
“But what do you think happened?”
Megan eyed her suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“I’m just curious, that’s all,” Zoe said, shrugging. She laced her hands behind her head and glanced up at the ceiling as though trying to think of an imaginary case. “Okay, let’s just say that a kid comes across…hmm…let’s say some kind of evidence. But the kid doesn’t know it was evidence of a crime—and the kid keeps it and later finds out that the police are looking for it. What do you think would happen to her if the police found out?”
Megan thought for a few moments then said, “Okay—I have a good example. You remember those boys that shot all those kids at Columbine High School?”
Zoe and Jen both nodded.
“My grandpa told me that one of the boys kept a diary.”
Zoe felt a lump in the pit of her stomach. “A diary?” she asked.
“Yeah, a diary—you know—a journal. And he had written all sorts of hateful and murderous things in it. Like that he and that other boy were planning to take a gun to school and shoot—‘mow down’—I think those were his exact words—five hundred students. And this was all written down in the months before he and that other boy did it.”
“What happened to the diary?” Jen asked.
“I can’t remember,” Megan replied. “Some people thought that the parents must have known about the diary before the killings ʼcause you know how parents always snoop in their kid’s diaries no matter where we hide them. So if this boy’s parents did know and never turned it over to the police, that would make them accessories to murder and they’d go to jail for the rest of their lives.”
Zoe gulped. “Just for not turning over a diary?” She thought of the close call she had had with Grace’s journal in the backpack yesterday. Except that was different. Aunt Grace was not some sort of mass murderer like those Columbine killers.
Megan nodded. “That’s right. They’d be left to rot in jail for the rest of their natural lives.”
Jen picked up a soy nut and popped it in her mouth. “Yeah, but that’s just if they’re grown-ups. I heard that kids can’t go to jail and that nothing’s left written on their records ʼcause they’re just kids. It’s all sponged clean.”
“Expunged,” Megan corrected her.
“Anyway, that’s what I heard,” Jen said with a s
hrug.
“Well, I’m sorry to say you’re wrong,” Megan retorted with an air of authority. “Bad kids get sent to the training school in Cranston, next to the prison—except it’s worse than prison.”
Zoe shuddered and hugged her knees to her body. She remembered driving past the training school on the way to Providence—rows of barbed wire, the massive granite stone buildings—like something out of a Gothic horror novel.
“I hear Craig Price is locked up there,” Megan said. She popped the last small bite of her sandwich into her mouth then stood and checked her lipstick in the mirror.
Everyone knew about Craig Price. He had murdered his neighbors in cold blood starting when he was a teenager—sliced them up with a knife. His neighbors said he was just a regular guy—nice and all that. But then they came to discover that he had also murdered some other neighbors a few years earlier when he was only thirteen. Who would have believed it—in this nice quiet neighborhood in Warwick, just a few towns away from where they lived. Zoe closed her eyes and rested her forehead on her knees, trying to shut out the image. She could not think of anything worse than being locked up with a serial killer.
“And Sockanosset—that’s where bad girls are locked up,” Megan continued, “is even worse than the boy’s training school. I know because the sister of this guy who works at the Newport Creamery with my sister—well, like she got arrested for possession. And she was only a kid.ˮ Megan paused and helped herself to a Sun Chip.
“I thought the school closed down years ago,” Jen said.
Megan snorted. “So they claim—but it’s still standing there isn’t it?”
“What happened to her?” Zoe asked. She rubbed her hands together. It suddenly felt very cold in the room.
Megan shrugged. “Who knows what happened to her? I hear some of the girls who get sent there never come out again. That’s how bad it is. No one knows what happens to them.”
“No way!” Jen said, wide-eyed.
“It’s all true,” Megan assured her. “And there’s more. My dad told me Sockanosset was built on an old Indian graveyard and it’s haunted, and they found bones there once. I heard some of them belonged to the bad kids who had been locked up there and mysteriously disappeared. My dad used to tell us if we misbehaved one more time that he would drop us off at Sockanosset. Parents could do that back then,” she said. “Drop their naughty kids off there.”
A beep from outside broke the tension.
“Zoe, your father’s here,” Mrs. Lee called from the hallway.
Chapter Thirteen
By the time they got home, it was almost one-thirty. Zoe’s mind was racing a mile a minute as she reached for Yoda’s leash. She had to figure out a way to get the journal to the police without them knowing she had taken it from Grace’s room in the first place.
After walking Yoda to the end of the street, Zoe turned and headed back home like she had promised Dad. She had hoped for a chance to get the journal from the garage next door, but two dog walkers had stopped to chat in front of the driveway and were still gabbing when she came back from her walk. Talk about rotten luck.
When she returned, Dad was getting ready to leave again to meet with Uncle Patrick and the lawyer.
Zoe tossed her fleece jacket onto a kitchen chair and grabbed a handful of Skittles from a bowl on the counter. Yoda was lying next to the doorway between the kitchen and the family room, gnawing on a rawhide bone. Zoe popped the candies into her mouth and wandered into the family room.
Picking up the remote, she turned on the television—nothing but those stupid soap operas and news shows. Heaving a sigh of disgust, she dumped the remote, plunked herself down at the large wooden desk where the family computer was located, and checked her email. Nothing interesting—just gossip. The time at the bottom of the screen read 1:57 p.m. She threw her head back and groaned—three more hours of being imprisoned alone in this house.
Shifting impatiently in her seat, she picked up a section of newspaper lying on the desk. It was opened to the obituary page. Aunt Grace’s obituary was outlined in yellow marker. It read:
Esposito, Grace D., 53, of Exeter, RI, died on October 21st at South County Hospital. She was the devoted wife of the late Lucian Esposito. Born in Providence, the daughter of the late Thomas S. and Aileen M. Delaney, Mrs. Esposito lived in Providence most of her life before moving to Exeter a few months ago following the death of her husband.
Mrs. Esposito graduated from Providence College and earned her PhD in Philosophy from Boston University. She was a much beloved professor of philosophy at Rhode Island College for almost thirty years.
In her leisure time she wrote fiction and volunteered at a local soup kitchen. But most of all she loved spending time with her family.
Survivors include two brothers: Stephan Delaney of Exeter and Patrick Delaney of Charlestown; two stepchildren: Andrea and Anthony Esposito; one nephew: Nickie Delaney; and two nieces: Kayla-Marie Delaney and Zoe Delaney.
The funeral service will be held at 11:00 on Tuesday at St. Mary Magdalene Church on Old Boston Neck Road. Visiting hours are Monday afternoon from 4:00 to 6:00 at the Warren Funeral Home in North Kingstown.
Zoe set down the newspaper. She closed her eyes, trying to keep from crying. Even though her dad had been raised Catholic, her family had only attended services a few times. She wished she knew more about what happened to people after they died. She thought about what Mrs. Lee had said—that Grace was still here inside of her.
“Help me, Aunt Grace,” she whispered. “Please tell me what to do.ˮ But, try as she may, she heard no answer. After a few moments, Zoe opened her eyes. Maybe she needed one of those crystal balls like the fortune tellers used to communicate with the dead.
She took a deep breath and walked over to the large window. The sun was barely visible through the pale gray cloud cover. The pink impatiens along the edge of the deck, so colorful just a few days ago, sprawled dead and limp on the ground—victims of the killer frost.
Suddenly she felt overcome by a sense of urgency. She needed to find a way to get Grace’s journal to the police so they could see what a wonderful person her aunt was. A pile of unopened mail in a leather letter tray caught her eye.
Then she had an idea. Maybe she could mail the journal to the police—anonymously, of course. Except, she couldn’t mail the journal from Exeter, or the police might suspect her of having taken it.
She leaned back against the wall and rubbed her forehead. Think. Maybe she could mail it from North Kingstown where the funeral parlor and the church were—that was, if she could sneak away and if there was a mailbox nearby—and those were big “ifs.ˮ The only problem was that the police might still suspect her since Zoe and her family only lived a little over a mile—an easy walk—from the North Kingstown town line.
Then she remembered Jen took dance classes in Warwick. Maybe she could ask Jen to mail it while she was there. If the journal was mailed from Warwick, the police would naturally suspect Luke’s kids of having stolen it, since they lived in Warwick. Her jaw tightened. It would serve them right for accusing Grace of being—what did Dad call it?—a “black widow spider.”
Zoe slumped down in the desk chair and crossed her arms. Dad was busy with the lawyer and had mentioned he had a four o’clock appointment with a client after that. Mom never got home before five-thirty on Fridays. Meanwhile here she was—stuck at home—alone with nothing to do.
She looked around. She was considering losing herself in a video game when a thought occurred to her. It was at least three hours before either of her parents would get home. That gave her plenty of time to get the journal from next door. Except—she felt a pang of guilt—she had promised Dad. Then again, she had kept her promise to him—she was back from walking Yoda within twenty minutes, just like she had said she would be. And the garage next door was almost like being home. If she stood in the right place, she could see her house through the woods. So really, when you thought about it, she wasn’t doing any
thing wrong.
Her conscience satisfied, she began searching through the desk drawers and found a large envelope. Taking three stamps off the roll in the top drawer, she placed them in the upper right hand corner of the envelope. She paused. Would three stamps be enough?
She pulled another twenty stamps from the roll and stuck them in four neat rows in the corner of the envelope. There. Returning to the computer, she typed in “Rhode Island State Police and Detectives” and clicked on “search.ˮ Using her left hand to disguise her handwriting she wrote the address for the Rhode Island State Police Detective Bureau in Scituate in large bold letters on the front of the envelope.
Once this was done, she grabbed her fleece jacket, folded the envelope, and put it in the deep pocket on the inside of the jacket. Yoda followed her to the back door. He whimpered and cocked his head and gazed up at her with pleading eyes.
“No, Yoda,” she said sternly. “Stay. I’ll be right back.”
Making sure no one was watching, she ran across the driveway, past Grace’s car, and along the wooded path to the house next door. A squirrel on a branch high overhead scolded as she pushed her way through.
Squeezing through the back door to the garage, she fetched the journal from the plastic FedEx bag and stuck it in the envelope. She was about to seal the envelope when it occurred to her that she’d have time to read a bit more of the journal before mailing it off. Maybe there was something in it that could help her find out more about Grace’s murderer.
She pulled the journal from the envelope. Sitting down on the boards under the broken window, she began thumbing through the pages of the journal until she found the next entry for April.
April 19
Got called into old Dean Peckham’s office this morning. What an ordeal! The air in his office smelled of stale sweat and old books. Honestly, I thought I would gag. I cleared my throat to get his attention and he swivels around in his chair and tells me to have a seat. Then, he launches into this tirade about what a student had reported. Of course, I knew it had to be Mike trying to get back at me for not raising his grade on that idiotic essay he wrote. I told Peckham so and that it was Mike who had come on to me. Well, he just scowled as if he hadn’t heard anything I’d said and told me he wanted a hearing before the disciplinary board. I couldn’t believe my ears. These administrators always take the side of the student. “Poor Mike”—I can just hear it now. Hey, I’m the victim here, not Mike. All I did was give him exactly what he’d asked for. Then he turns and betrays me. Christ—the snitch’s father works on a lobster boat out of Point Judith and barely speaks a word of English—probably some sort of illegal for all I know. And I’m the one being treated like a criminal! Life just isn’t fair.
Fall From Grace Page 8