Don't Scream

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Either Allerson gets around, or we’ve got ourselves a genuine serial killer on our hands.”

  “What?”

  “One of Matilda Harrington’s sorority sisters just turned up dead in Cedar Crest…exactly the same MO.”

  “How ‘exactly the same’?”

  “Exactly exactly the same. Somebody threw Fiona Fitzgerald a nice little party for her thirtieth birthday—which is today.”

  With a muttered curse that would inflame Devorah Hiles if she could hear it from the next room, Quincy is already grabbing his keys and jacket, his mother’s fried chicken and apple pie forgotten.

  “Here, honey, drink this.”

  Ashley looks up to see a female police officer holding out a plastic cup of water. She shakes her head, feeling her father’s protective arm tighten around her.

  Daddy is sitting in the chair beside hers; they’re in a small room at police headquarters, where they were taken in a squad car.

  Brynn, Caleb, and Jeremy were driven in a second car. Garth came to get the boys so he could take them over to a neighbor’s house, and then he’s supposed to come here.

  “Drink the water, Ash,” Daddy says gently, taking the cup from the police officer and closing Ashley’s fingers around it.

  She takes a sip.

  It’s warm and it tastes yucky, she thinks idly.

  Then, just as idly, Mom’s dead.

  But neither thought sinks in. It’s as though her brain has been injected with Novocain. She’s aware of potentially excruciating thoughts jabbing at her, but she feels nothing, just like in the dentist’s chair when she had her tooth drilled.

  Ashley sips more water, and she nods when her father asks her worriedly if she’s okay, and she wonders when her mother is going to come get her, and then she remembers that she isn’t.

  Ever.

  You should be crying, Ashley keeps telling herself. Her eyes are strangely dry.

  But Brynn, who just disappeared behind a closed door with two detectives, has been crying—sometimes hysterically—ever since she let out that blood-curdling scream back at home.

  Then she immediately shoved Ashley outside again through the open front door before she could glimpse whatever was in the house.

  At that point, Brynn was so incoherent that Daddy didn’t even understand what she was trying to say. He kept shouting, “What? What is it?” as he ran past Brynn and Ashley, and then he screamed, too.

  That was the most horrible sound Ashley has ever heard in her life. A man’s scream. The unnatural, violent sound sent chills through her. “She’s dead!” Brynn was shrieking, over and over.

  She’s talking about Mom, Ashley realized. Mom must be dead.

  Inside the house.

  “Did she have a heart attack?” she had asked Daddy and Brynn at one point. She was thinking of Meg’s father, who works hard at a stressful job, but not as hard as Mom does.

  Nobody works as hard as Mom does.

  Worked, she thought dully. And, did.

  Neither her father nor Brynn answered her question about the heart attack, but Ashley overheard two of the cops talking. At first she thought they had said “prince,” but then she realized it was “prints.” As in fingerprints.

  Even Ashley knows that you don’t look for fingerprints when someone dies unless you think somebody killed them.

  Who would want to kill her mother?

  “Was it a robber?” she asks her father now, then notices that her thigh is wet, a dark stain spreading across her jeans. Oh. Her hand is shaking so badly that she’s spilling water all over herself.

  “What, Ash?”

  “Did a robber break in and kill Mom?”

  Daddy blinks. “What?”

  She repeats the question.

  It takes him a second to answer, “I don’t know.”

  He’s upset about Mom. Maybe he’s thinking that they never should have gotten divorced. Maybe he thinks that if they were still married, this wouldn’t have happened, because he could have protected her.

  “What is Brynn telling the police in there?” She gestures at the closed door.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do they think she knows who killed Mom?”

  Daddy just shakes his head without looking at her, and his mouth is a straight, tight line.

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  “Let’s go over this again, Mrs. Saddler.”

  Dazed, seated in the interrogation room, Brynn nods. She watches through tear-blurred eyes as one of the two Cedar Crest detectives glances over the pages of notes he just took.

  I saw her; I saw Fee…Oh, Fee…

  Oh, my God…

  “You say your friend told you she was going away for a few days,” says the more vocal detective, a balding, middle-aged man, “but that she never said where, or why…”

  Yes, she did say why, but I didn’t tell you.

  I have to tell you. You need to know the whole truth.

  Coherent thoughts are breaking through the haze of grief and shock more frequently now, trailing a fresh stream of guilt.

  Yes, they need to know. But not yet. Not without Garth. She has to tell her husband first, so that he can hear it from her privately.

  The brief contact with him, when he showed up here, was so comforting. She doesn’t even know who called him; she was too hysterical to do it herself.

  But suddenly, he was there, holding her tight, telling her he loved her, saying he’d get the boys.

  The boys. Poor boys.

  Why did I have to insist on bringing them over there with me?

  Because Fee had asked her to, so that Ashley would jump at the chance to go home with her.

  If only she hadn’t listened to Fee.

  If only she’d left them at home with Garth, as he had wanted her to do…

  The boys started crying when they heard her panicked screams, and she was in no condition to comfort them. She vaguely remembers one of the cops in the back of the car with them, talking to them until Garth arrived.

  He promised he’d drop Caleb and Jeremy at Maggie’s and come right down here.

  So where is he?

  Maybe he’s already back, waiting out there with Pat and Ashley, unaware that Brynn needs him desperately. Now. Right this second.

  “Do you know if—” She breaks off, realizing she just spoke right over the detective, still recapping his notes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “No, it’s all right. What did you want to know?”

  “Is my husband here?”

  The balding, middle-aged detective looks at the other balding, middle-aged detective, who promptly says, “I’ll go check,” and steps out of the room.

  The first detective resumes. “Ms. Fitzgerald asked you to pick up her daughter today when her ex-husband returned her after a weekend visit, but she didn’t tell him in advance that she was leaving town.”

  Brynn shakes her head, fishing in her pocket for another tissue. The clump in her hand is sodden.

  Oh, Fiona…

  An audible sob escapes her.

  The detective waits for it to subside, then goes on. “So you believe she didn’t tell him because they didn’t get along and she thought he would be upset with her.”

  She sniffles. “I didn’t say that exactly…but, yes. I guess that’s why.”

  As the detective continues recapping their conversation, Brynn wipes her streaming eyes and manages to comment appropriately, only half-listening.

  Her thoughts are on Fiona.

  On what happened to her.

  Brynn can’t stop reliving it.

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  And I screamed.

  As she screamed, she turned to flee, and there was Ashley.

  Brynn shoved her, hard, instinctively trying to protect her.

  Oh, God. Poor Ashley.

  Poor Fee…

  “So you
were at the victim’s home to pick up her child…”

  “Yes.”

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  What was Fiona doing there, at home? She wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Did she lie to Brynn about going away? But why would she?

  Did she stay at home and throw herself a birthday party that was interrupted by the killer?

  How else to explain the cake, the hat, the wrapped gift in her hands, as though someone had just handed it to her in the instant before she was murdered.

  Unless the killer put it there…afterward.

  And maybe—she grips the arms of the chair to stay steady as a tide of terror washes over her—the killer also set up the “party.”

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Saddler?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m just…I feel a little bit…”

  “Faint?” The detective is standing over her chair, concerned. Kind.

  He won’t be, she tells herself, when he finds out that I know more than I’m telling.

  “Let me get you some water.”

  She nods. Closes her eyes.

  I walked into the house. I turned my head…

  And I saw her.

  “Brynn?”

  Garth is here. In the room. He kneels by her chair and takes her into his arms. She can feel his stubbly beard against her temple, can smell the leather of his jacket.

  “Garth—” She’s clinging to him, crying again. Huge, heaving, shuddering sobs. “I need to talk to you alone.”

  The lower-reservoir jogging path through Central Park is crowded at this hour on a sunny October Sunday, but Isaac pays little attention to the others.

  His thoughts are consumed not just by what happened ten years ago, but by all that has transpired in the past few weeks.

  Three times, Isaac was tempted to spill the whole story. First to Brynn, then to Kylah, then to Detective Hiles.

  All of it…including the secret Rachel confessed to him when he called to wish her Happy Birthday just hours before she disappeared.

  Three times, he refrained.

  But he keeps going over and over it in his head. The memory of that day, Rachel’s twentieth birthday, is as fresh as the conversation he had this morning with Kylah over an article in the Sunday Times.

  Sitting in his new midtown office that day ten years ago, he sang “Happy Birthday” to Rachel the minute she answered the phone.

  The other end of the line was silent when he finished…until she suddenly burst into tears.

  He figured she was just a little emotional because, as she put it, he was the only person in her life who always remembered her birthday. Even her flaky mother had been known to forget.

  So, to lighten the mood, Isaac teased, “Wow, I figured my voice might be a little flat, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

  She didn’t laugh. “I have to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone, Isaac.”

  “All right.”

  “No, I mean you have to swear you won’t tell. Do you swear to God?”

  “I swear to God.” He clutched the phone, wondering what it could be only briefly before the likely answer came to him.

  He figured she was dropping out of school—she had threatened to do that a few times over the years. She wanted to go to Europe and study music, or hang out in the East Village and compose songs, or…

  She had a hundred different plans.

  Some even involved him—” Let’s join the Peace Corps together,” or “Why don’t we open a great burger joint somewhere?”

  None of those plans, however, involved the bombshell she was about to drop.

  “Is there anything else?” Garth asks, looking at his wife. Really looking at her, feeling as though he’s seeing her for the first time in years.

  Feeling as though he’s seeing a total stranger.

  Brynn’s bloodshot eyes are sunken into raw, red craters. Her face is blotchy, her ponytail bedraggled, sweatshirt cuffs damp as though she used them to wipe her nose.

  “Anything else?” she echoes. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, is there anything else you need to tell me while we’re alone in here?”

  For the first time since he got here, her eyes flash a sign of life. “No,” she says curtly. “That’s everything.”

  Garth rakes a hand through his hair. “How could you not have said anything about this for all these years?”

  “Because it wasn’t up to me. I swore that I wouldn’t.”

  “Some silly sorority oath? You can’t be serious, Brynn. Somebody’s life was hanging in the balance. Your friend’s life.”

  “You don’t understand. I didn’t think that it was at the time. I thought she was dead. By the time we realized she—or her body—wasn’t in the woods anymore, it was too late to say anything. We had already pretended we didn’t know anything about it.”

  “So you just decided to go on pretending. Even to me.”

  She nods, still looking him in the eye, her chin lifted—but quavering slightly. “It was all we could do, Garth.”

  “You could have gone to the cops at some point.”

  “At which point? And if I had gone, it would have incriminated my friends, too.”

  “Even if not the cops, then…You could have told me,” he says through a clenched jaw, shaking his head.

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Because of the oath. I know.”

  “No, not just that. Because…I was afraid of how you’d react.”

  With an ache in his gut, he says, “You should have told me anyway.”

  “It would have been different, maybe, if you weren’t right here, in this world. If you were someone I had met in some other place, someone who had never heard of Rachel Lorent. But you knew her, you taught her in class, you searched for her. How could I tell you?”

  “How could you not tell me?” he returns, shaking his head.

  But he knows how. He knows all about shameful secrets; about caustic guilt and consternation that eat away at you, making it difficult to look your spouse in the eye when you think she might somehow read your thoughts; making it impossible to sleep at night.

  With her. Without her.

  “I’m sorry, Garth.”

  Yes. She is. Profound remorse is vividly etched on her face.

  “I know.”

  I’m sorry too, Brynn. So, so sorry.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “Whatever happens, I’ll stand by you,” Garth says hurriedly. “I promise, Brynn. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she chokes out.

  Garth bends over and squeezes her fiercely, wishing he could hold on as tight to life as they knew it.

  Because he can feel it slipping away.

  Then another knock on the door, and one of the detectives pokes his head in.

  “Excuse me, folks, but there’s someone here who needs to speak to you.”

  The door opens wider and a tall, bearded African-American man strides past the detective and flashes his badge. “Sergeant Quincy Hiles. I’m with the Boston P.D.”

  “I’m pregnant, Isaac.”

  Those words have haunted him for ten years.

  Even now, they reverberate through his body with every pounding footfall as he moves faster still along the path.

  No longer is he jogging—he’s running now, full speed ahead, sprinting past everyone else on the path…trying to escape.

  But he never can.

  “I’m pregnant, Isaac.”

  Rachel choked it out through tears, and, at first, he wasn’t even sure he heard her right.

  But then she repeated it—I’m pregnant—loudly and clearly.

  An unspoken question—his, of course, the logical one to ask—hung silently between them for a long moment.

  Finally, he found his voice.

  “What are you going to do, Rach?” That, of course, wasn’t the question.

  But it
was a good one.

  Her answer was prompt…But he could hear the uncertainty in her voice. “Have it. Raise it.”

  “Where? How?”

  “I don’t know…But I’m definitely going to have this baby. Even if I have to drop out of school. Which I will have to do, because how else can I do this? And, of course, my parents are going to freak out if I’m a single mom without a college degree.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  She was right.

  They would. For two people who went through marriages faster than they did checkbooks, Rachel’s parents were surprisingly conservative, and they were very big on academics and education.

  “Maybe I’ll just take off,” she said wistfully.

  “Take off? You can’t do that. You mean…like, just go?”

  “Yes. I can have the baby somewhere far away…on my own—”

  “Alone?”

  She didn’t reply to that.

  Instead, she said, “I need you, Isaac. I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do. Please…Can you come up here tomorrow?”

  Of course he said yes.

  Then she said, “Hang on a second,” and he heard her talking to someone on the other end of the line.

  She came back on and said, “Um, I have to go. Someone needs to use the phone.”

  Someone always needed to use the phone in a houseful of sorority girls in the days before cell phones were ubiquitous.

  So that was the end of his final conversation with Rachel.

  At the time, he figured his big question—the crucial one—could wait until he could hear the answer in person.

  But, of course, she disappeared before he could get up there to ask: Am I the baby’s father?

  For the second time today, the familiar, shameful details spew from Brynn’s lips, propelled by a decade’s worth of pent-up angst.

  Brynn can’t help but feel like a bottle of champagne kept tightly corked for ten years, then violently shaken and abruptly released.

  The Boston detective and his partner, a pretty blonde, sit and listen. They nod and occasionally ask questions. Still staunchly beside her, Garth keeps his arm tightly around her shoulders.

  But she isn’t leaning on him.

  Somehow, she’s sitting straight and tall. It’s almost as if, in purging herself of the guilty burden, she’s made room for some long-suppressed inner core of fortitude to expand.