The plaza was a study in the student pecking order, the four square center planters with low walls all taken by jocks and cheerleaders, other less dominant cliques shunted off to the sides. All of them looking impossibly young to Roarke’s eyes, children playing at an adult game.
Sixteen years ago there would have been no smartphones. No iPhones. Facebook hadn’t even launched yet. It was a less connected time, and a more connected time.
A blond girl, slender and waifish, glanced at Roarke as she walked by. Not Cara, of course, or her ghost, either.
He didn’t look after her. But he turned, opened the door of the administration building, and walked in.
He’d already decided to use his Bureau credentials to pave the way. The receptionist was suitably impressed, spoke hurriedly into an intercom, and then he was ushered behind the counter and into Principal Lethbridge’s office.
Lethbridge was a surprisingly tall man, broad shouldered, just starting to develop a paunch. His hale and hearty persona was a thin veneer stretched over an inner core of menace. Kids would think twice before fucking with him.
He stood and reached a hand across the desk. “Agent Roarke, is it? We don’t often get the FBI coming around.”
Roarke shook hands briefly, got right to the point. “I’m looking for information on a former student of yours. Cara Lindstrom. She would have been enrolled as Eden Ballard.”
The principal’s face changed to a combination of wariness and something else that Roarke couldn’t quite interpret. “I’m not sure I’ll have much to tell you. You’re talking about fifteen years ago—”
Roarke kept his voice pleasant. “Sixteen. Were you at the school at the time?”
“I was. Vice-principal.”
“Are you saying that you don’t remember Cara Lindstrom? Surely you were aware of her history. All of her history.”
“The school was aware,” Lethbridge said stiffly. “But she was only here for two weeks. ”
“What happened after two weeks?”
“As I remember, she was transferred elsewhere in the county by Social Services.”
“Not because of something that happened here at the school?”
“Nothing to do with the school. It was Social Services’ decision.”
Roarke’s next question came out of the blue, even for him. “Did anything odd happen that month, while she was here?”
“Odd?” the principal repeated.
“Anything violent or traumatic . . .”
Roarke could see from the subtle, sudden tension in Lethbridge’s body that there was something. Definitely something.
“That’s a very strange question,” the principal hedged.
“But?”
Lethbridge deliberated. Roarke waited him out. Finally, he answered, “A student committed suicide.”
Roarke stared at him.
“It was unexpected, and obviously very disturbing to the whole school.”
“A boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
“When was that, exactly?”
“I would have to look it up.”
“Thanks, I’d appreciate that,” Roarke said, as if Lethbridge had offered.
The principal seemed to struggle internally between anger and acquiescence, but ultimately leaned forward and hit the button on his intercom. “Karen, would you bring me a copy of The Wolf, from 2000?”
Roarke felt a jolt at the words, but realized the principal was talking about a yearbook.
Still, the name . . . worrisome.
The office door opened and a secretary came in with a slim bound volume and a much thicker one. “Didn’t know if you meant the yearbook or the paper,” she said, holding both up inquiringly.
“Both,” Roarke said immediately. “Please.”
She glanced at him, then put both books on the desk in front of the principal, and stepped out again, closing the door behind her. Roarke saw that the thicker binder was bound newsprint: the school’s papers for the year.
The principal opened the yearbook and flipped to a page near the front, looked down at it for a moment, then turned the book around to face Roarke.
Roarke looked down on a studio-posed photo of a girl with short, curly brown hair, a few prominent freckles.
There were words and dates below the photo:
LAURA HUELL
APRIL 2, 1985 – JANUARY 22, 2000
REST IN PEACE
Fourteen years old.
She was fresh-faced and pretty without being either beautiful or memorable, and her smile wasn’t a full-wattage one, but it wasn’t haunted or visibly troubled, either. Just a teenager. Before sex. Before trauma.
But something had happened to make her take her own life, and it had happened when Cara was in the school.
On the same day that the group home counselor had been murdered.
CARA
Chapter Ten
Just one night without the medication and already she can feel the buzzing in her veins. It startles her, the power of it. She has been medicated for the past nine years of her life; she can barely remember what it feels like not to be. But this is something unlike anything she has felt before.
She walks down the hallway of the home carefully, as if she is balancing on a tightrope, and sees Ms. Sharonda watching her from her desk as she gathers her school things from the coat rack.
“You all right, there, Eden?” she demands.
“I’m fine.”
She’s not fine. But she has purpose. She heads for the shuttle with the other girls.
On the way to school she stares out the window at the hills, and she plans.
This is what she knows. There is the bleeding girl, and there is the counselor, and there is the man in the van.
And there is the blackness, the danger, around all of them.
But she doesn’t know if all three things are connected. That’s what she has to find out.
At school, she begins.
The bleeding girl’s name is Laura Huell. She shares only one class with Cara. She eats lunch alone at the picnic tables outside the visual arts studio.
When she sees Cara coming, she scurries away like a frightened mouse. It is impossible to ask her what she knows, about the counselor or the man in the van or anything else. She simply will not speak.
Cara is frustrated. Angry. But she understands. She’s just a girl, herself. There’s nothing she can do about what is out there. She can’t help.
So she goes to class, and she does her homework, and she waits, and she watches.
In two days, she sees the white van three times. Once it is parked beside the curb outside the school, too far away for her to see a license plate. Twice she sees it driving on the street as the minibus takes the group home kids to and from school.
But is it the van? That is the point, obviously, of using an unmarked, windowless white van. They can be rented. There is no telling one white van from another. It is a useless clue, good only for scaring her and making her doubt herself.
She uses twenty-five cents from her weekly Social Services allowance of five dollars to make a phone call at the school’s payphone, and check up on the counselor. She remembers the phone number of the group home in Palm Desert. The one where the monster last struck. She stands in the open box and deposits her quarter, dials, waits nervously. When a female voice answers, she tries to make her voice lower, older.
“May I speak with Mr. Pierson, please?”
“He doesn’t work here anymore.”
Cara’s heart sinks. Then she steels herself, and makes her voice gruff. “This is Ms. Lewis in Las Piedras. He was up here at the home yesterday and left some keys. How do I get in touch with him?”
When she hangs up, she has a phone number and an address in Palm Desert: the Golden Shadows RV Park.
A small relief. He’s not living here, in town. And now she knows how to check up on him.
The voices are slithering noises in the back of her head. They grow louder as
the moon fattens, but what they say is still elusive.
Reading helps. Chemistry equations help. Focusing on her homework can be lifesaving; it turns down the volume on the constant whispering.
On the fourth school day, the minibus does not have to stop at the second group home, consequently they arrive at school early.
As Cara walks in through the front gates, she sees Laura walking down across the quad. There is a blankness to her face that Cara recognizes. She is far, far away. She moves on autopilot, like the walking dead. But there is no blood. Not now.
On impulse, Cara changes directions and follows her.
Laura enters a building and turns right into a corridor. This early in the morning, the hall is empty. Cara hangs back, watching from the intersection of corridors, as Laura walks down it, the tap-tap of her footsteps echoing softly on the walls. She stops in front of a door at the end of the hall, and stands there, still, before she reaches out for the knob.
Then she walks through the door.
Cara moves down the hall, closer to the door. There is a hand-lettered sign taped to it.
PALMERS MEETING
The door opens suddenly and the vice-principal is there. Lethbridge.
Cara takes a step back.
He raises his eyebrows. “Hello there, Eden. Are you here for Palmers?”
Cara looks quickly into the room, behind him. A circle of boys and girls in chairs. A flag in front of the room, and writing on the chalkboard:
THREE PILLARS OF SERVICE: GOD, FAMILY, COMMUNITY
And a name:
MEL FRANZEN, PALMERS CHAIR
A man in a suit stands in front of the circle, fleshy, with pale crew-cut hair; broad shouldered and big smiled.
Laura is there, in the circle of chairs.
And the blood is there, a crimson pool at her feet.
“Come on in, Eden. You’re very welcome.” Lethbridge holds the door open.
Behind him, the crew-cut man in the suit looks toward her. His eyes crawl on her skin. Suddenly Cara can barely breathe through the hammering of her heart.
“Wrong room,” she says, backing away. “I’m late.”
She turns away from the door and walks down the hall. She feels the vice-principal’s eyes burning into her back and has to force herself not to run.
ROARKE
Chapter Eleven
Roarke had to push a little, but he walked out of the high school with copies of the yearbook and the binder of school newspapers.
He sat in his car, and he looked down at the photo of Laura, the dates of the obituary.
He checked the file of Cara’s early years just to be sure, but he was right. Laura Huell died on the same day as the counselor.
He didn’t like it. Not at all.
He looked out the window at the school.
There are no coincidences with Cara. Something happened here.
Lethbridge was useless, clueless.
There must be someone else I can talk to about this. Someone who was there. Who would know?
He reached for the file again and opened it, looking for a name.
As it happened, Ms. Sharonda Lewis was still the director of the group home in Las Piedras where Cara had stayed for her two weeks in the town.
Many of California’s one thousand group homes, or “congregate care,” for teenagers in the Social Services system had been closed down since the end of the nineties because of criminal mismanagement, disorder, neglect, and abuse. The fact that this one was still open hinted at it being one of the better ones.
It was a stucco house in a residential neighborhood, a low, wide suburban box, with a long horseshoe driveway.
Roarke walked past a dry fountain with a worn, dusty angel statue. The sun was warm above. There was wind. There were palm trees.
Inside, the house was eerily quiet, devoid of its teenage residents; it was a school day. Sharonda Lewis met with him in her office. She was a strong, striking African-American woman. Roarke put her age at around forty-five, which would have made her not even thirty years old when Cara was in her care.
“I headed up the San Francisco FBI team that oversaw the Cara Lindstrom case. She was a resident here sixteen years ago. You may have heard something about her recently—”
“I heard,” Ms. Lewis said. She was impassive, regal. A force.
“You remember her, then?”
“You’re talking about sixteen years ago. And she was here for all of two weeks.” Like the principal, the woman didn’t seem about to give him anything.
“But she was something of a standout, wasn’t she?” Roarke suggested.
Ms. Lewis stared at him hard, then for some reason, relented. “She was that.”
“Why only two weeks?”
She shrugged. “She’d just been released from CYA. We had an open bed that week. It was a temporary placement. That’s the way it works.”
“Was there any trouble while she was here?” He watched her.
“I would say the opposite. She kept her head down.”
“She was seeing a psychiatrist twice a week at the home, correct?”
She looked wary.
“It’s in her file,” he prompted.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“What was the diagnosis?”
Her face hardened. “You said you saw the file.”
He tried the question a different way. “Did you believe the psychiatrist got the diagnosis right?”
“I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“But there are things you saw and heard . . .” He looked at her, and waited.
She exhaled sharply. “These kids . . . they have combinations of so many traumas. Diagnoses conflict. Then add to that the normal adolescent hormonal spikes . . . I don’t know how possible it is to diagnose all of that.”
That was always the sense Roarke had gotten from Cara’s files. Over the years she’d been labeled with early-onset schizophrenia, childhood bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and every combination of the above.
“You didn’t notice peculiar delusions?” he asked. Did she ever talk to you about It? was what he meant.
“I said, she kept her head down. She was high functioning.”
“Were you aware that she left the home at night?”
She looked murderous. “Not on my watch she didn’t.”
Roarke believed her. But he also knew that group homes were most often understaffed, with underpaid and inexperienced workers. He knew that homes had wildly different house rules about curfew and leaving the homes. And he knew that Cara was infinitely, uncannily resourceful. Somehow she had gotten out, gotten herself out to Palm Desert. Somehow.
He tried again. “She was transferred just two weeks after she was assigned here. Are you sure there wasn’t a particular reason she was moved?”
The director gave him a stony look. “She got a more permanent placement. Like I said. It’s how it works.”
“While she was here, did you counsel her? Did she confide in you?”
“About what?”
About It, he wanted to say. About this idea she has that she can see evil.
“About anything,” he said aloud. “Did you have any sessions with her?”
“She had sessions with the psychiatrist.”
“I meant—you didn’t do any counseling yourself?”
“I’m the director here. I manage the house.”
He looked at her, wondering why she was stonewalling him. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—you seem like the kind of person . . .”
She stared back at him, giving him nothing.
“What I mean is, I’ve never in my life seen anyone who needed help as much as she did.”
Her look was merciless. “Agent Roarke, are you familiar with California Youth Authority?”
“Somewhat.”
“Whatever you’ve read, whatever you’re imagining, it is worse. I assure you. It is not juvenile hall. It is not a youth home or
a camp. It is prison. Before all the lawsuits they kept kids on lockdown twenty-three hours a day. Do you have any idea what it does to a child to be in solitary twenty-three hours a day?”
She shook her head, looking somewhere beyond him now. “When one of those lawsuits forced the facilities to perform their mandate of education, the system’s bright idea was to put the wards in cages for school hours. We’re talking a desk in a cage the size of a phone booth.”
Roarke felt pain in his head, pain in his heart. It was horrific . . . and too easy to picture.
You want to know how a fourteen-year-old child becomes a killer? You just heard it. Do you really need to know anything more than that?
Ms. Lewis nodded. “They go into the system mental . . . they come out much worse.”
“I’ve met Cara,” he said, finally. “I know what it did to her.”
The director sat up so fast her chair hit the desk, hard. “You are not hearing me. It’s all of them. Kids who have spent years of their lives living in closets or basements. Some of them we have to train how to tie their shoes and wash themselves. We get kids so hyped up on rage it takes six, seven, eight counselors to restrain them. Last week a girl here tried to eat a light bulb. Last year I had a brother and sister who were forced by a relative to have sex with each other at the bottom of a dry swimming pool, while people lined up to buy tickets.”
She stared at him, merciless. “You never in your life saw a kid who needed saving so bad? I see them every day. Every single day.”
“I hear you,” he said softly.
She finally leaned back in her chair, as if drained. “Cara wasn’t feral. She wasn’t violent or suicidal. She went to school. She took her meds. She did her work. She was in better shape than most. Wherever she learned it, the child knew how to conduct herself.”
Or she was just smart enough to play it that way, Roarke thought, but he knew the director was right. What he saw was nothing compared to what Ms. Lewis had seen, because for her it was kids 24-7. And he also realized that even at fourteen Cara might well have known to show nothing to this sharp-eyed, sharp-witted force of a woman.
Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4) Page 6