The Little Black Dress

by Linda Palund

  “Look, I’ll just come back another time.” And I made as if to leave.

  “No. Please stay.” He said this slightly louder, but still in his soft, hoarse voice. And he leaned back after he said this as if it had taken all his strength to utter those few words, and closed his eye again. After a few moments, he turned his head toward me and kind of nodded toward the chair by his bed. “Please sit down.”

  He was so terrible to look at, it made me afraid to come close to him, but I remembered my mission, and I said thank you and sat down primly on the seat next to his bed. I was so close to him I could see the layers of bandages and all the other tubes and bags that were attached to him and to his bed. He was obviously in really bad shape.

  He looked at me again with his one good eye, which fortunately was his right eye, so it was closest to me, and he didn’t have to turn his head too far. “I think I remember seeing you around campus,” he said, and even under the bandages, I could see his face contort in pain when he talked for longer than a few syllables. “Sorry,” he went on, “it hurts to talk. It hurts to do anything.”

  And he leaned back against his pillows again.

  I thought maybe he had passed out, but then he suddenly spoke again. “I saw her, all right,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “She’s damned me to hell.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, all innocence.

  “I deserved this. I know I deserved this, but you’ve got no idea how bad it feels.” His voice was louder now, and I could see him straining to look at me. “I saw her ghost, all right, and now I’m in hell.”

  “Did she say anything to you?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

  “She didn’t need to. She didn’t need to say anything.” He shook his head stiffly, as if his neck were in a cast. “Now my life is over. It’s all over. I just want to die now, but they won’t let me.”

  This was a lot heavier than even I had expected it would be. The boy was so obviously in severe distress. He really did look like he was suffering the torments of hell. He might have been responsible for the cruel and brutal attack on Carmen, but now I couldn’t stop myself from feeling sorry for him.

  “Oh, don’t say that. Please don’t say that,” I said, like any girl would. “I’m sure things will get better for you. You’ll get better. Everything will be all right,” I said, using all the lies everyone always uses, but he wasn’t having any of it.

  “No, you don’t understand,” he groaned out these words. “My life is really over. I’ve ruined it, and now all I can feel is pain. I’m in so much pain, you can’t imagine. I feel like I’m in hell now. Nothing can save me. It’s over. It’s all over for me.”

  He kept shaking his head back and forth, even though I could see it hurt like hell to do it. I wondered if he was feeling terrible pain physically or if he was feeling the terrible anguish of remorse. He finally stopped writhing around and turned his head away from me and started to cry. I could tell it really hurt him to cry, because he moaned in pain between his sobs, and I felt truly awful. But at the same time, I felt as if I was close to an answer.

  That’s when I got the text from Wendy. The coach is here! Luke and the coach just walked into the cafeteria. They’re getting some sandwiches!

  I tried to text back as unobtrusively as possible while Jonny moaned with his back to me. “I remember who you are,” he said suddenly.

  I was startled, but I texted Wendy back quickly, Are they coming up here?

  “You’re Carmen’s friend,” Jonny moaned. “I’m so sorry. So terribly sorry.” He began sobbing even louder, and I couldn’t ask him what he was sorry about. Was it a confession? Could I use it in court?

  Wendy texted back, I think you should get out of there now—and I’ll meet you at the car.

  Shit. You’re right, I texted back.

  Jonny was sobbing softer now, almost as if he was falling asleep. I stood up. “Jonny?” I asked quietly.

  “It’s all right. Please go away now. Just leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry, Jonny. I’m really sorry. I hope you feel better.” At that moment, I meant it. If it was possible, and I wasn’t sure it was, he looked as if he had suffered enough.

  I stuffed my notepad into my handbag and slipped out the door as silently as I could and ran down the hall and through the patients’ lounge and called good-bye to the nurses at the reception desk as I ran past on my way to the elevator. There were two elevators, and happily for me, the left-hand one had its doors open, ready to go down, but just as I made to step inside, the other elevator arrived, and its doors opened, and the coach and Luke stepped out into the hall. I quickly looked down at my shoes and rushed into the other elevator and pressed the ground floor button. I didn’t know if they actually saw me, and I didn’t know if they would have recognized me if they had seen me.

  All I know is what happened later.

  CHAPTER 26

  BYE-BYE JONNY

  WENDY WAS waiting for me by the car. I had forgotten to give her my keys, but I was so stunned after my meeting with Jonny and so terrified that Luke and the coach might have seen me that I ran the entire length of the hospital and all the way to the parking lot. I was so happy to see her there that I gave her a sweaty hug and a grateful thank you before unlocking the car. Then we climbed in and scooted out of there and onto the I-10 in record time.

  I talked the whole way about how shocking Jonny looked and how surreal my meeting with him had been. I was pretty shaken by the experience and still didn’t know what to make of it. His misery was so real. It was hard to believe he could have ever inflicted the kind of suffering Carmen had endured. But in my heart, I felt it was true and that he really was sorry and possibly felt guilty and distressed enough to want to tell the DA. Then I began to fret about seeing the coach and Luke again. I just hoped to hell they hadn’t recognized me.

  When I dropped Wendy off at her house, we made plans to hang out at her house the next day. I still wanted to ask her about the cheerleaders. But right then I needed to call Seth’s dad like I had promised, and I needed to call Seth later too.

  I called Seth’s dad as soon as I got home. Whatever he was doing on that Saturday evening, he stopped as soon as he heard my voice. I could hear a television in the background and then him walking into another room and closing the door, so I guess he was home and had gone into his study to speak to me in private.

  “Hello, Lucy, how did it go today?” he asked casually, as if he were asking me about a baseball game or a science exam.

  “Well, I think it went well, but it was much harder than I thought it would be.” And for some reason, I didn’t know why, I just started crying.

  “Lucy, are you all right? Did anything happen to you? Should I send somebody over?”

  “No, no,” I sobbed, grabbing a wad of Kleenex from the coffee table, “it’s just that he’s in really bad shape. Jonny, I mean. He’s really fucked up bad. He can hardly speak, and he’s still covered up in bandages. He’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Could you talk to him at all?”

  “Well, I didn’t really get a chance to talk much. He was in such terrible pain, and he was crying and moaning the whole time. It was terrible.”

  “I’m so sorry, Lucy. That must have been awful for you.”

  I stopped crying then. I needed to tell him what I thought about the whole Jonny Freeman situation. “But, Captain Greenberg, he kept saying that Carmen had cursed him and that he deserved it. He said he felt as if he had been damned. He said he thought he was already in hell. He said he just wanted to die.”

  “What did you think when he said he thought he deserved it?”

  “Well, I thought he was confessing. That he deserved to be in hell because he had hurt Carmen.”

  “Could you try to write down everything you remember?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, I was in such shock by the whole experience I forgot to write anything down.”

  “Just write it down now, if you can, while it’s
still fresh in your mind. E-mail it to me when you finish, all right?”

  “Yes. I’ll do that. But I have something more.” I was biting my lip, because I wasn’t sure how he would take the next bit.

  “What is it?”

  “I saw the coach and Luke Skywalker there.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “I don’t know. I saw them when I was getting into the elevator and they were coming out of the other elevator on the burn unit floor, but I don’t think they saw me. Only, I can’t be sure.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. Listen, Lucy, be extra careful now. Stay with Seth or one of your other friends whenever you leave the house. Ride with someone to school. Do you have a friend you can ride with?”

  “Yes, I have my friend, Wendy, from down the street.”

  “You had better start carpooling with her. Do you think she’ll be okay with that?”

  “Yes. She’ll understand.” I didn’t tell him Wendy had come with me to the hospital. I didn’t know why, and I guessed it didn’t matter, but he did sound genuinely concerned.

  “Don’t forget about that e-mail.”

  “I won’t.” We said our good nights, and I wrote whatever I could remember in an e-mail and sent it to Captain Greenberg before I called Seth.

  That night, I was too keyed up to sleep again, so even after taking a Valium, I sat around in the rumpus room watching, or trying to watch, some old movies until well past 2:00 a.m. That’s why I heard the shuffling of feet upstairs and the front door closing. My own room extended out from the house and was built under the back deck, with its own en suite, so people weren’t usually moving about above my head, but the rumpus room was directly under the entrance to the house.

  I knew it was my dad leaving. He was a heart transplant surgeon and was often called out in the middle of the night. He had to be on call whenever a heart became available. He was one of the experts in his field, so even when we were on holiday, like in Europe last summer, he would go jetting off for a few days to pick up a heart for someone. They called it harvesting. He also harvested other healthy organs people might want to donate, like livers and kidneys, but he was mainly renowned for his ability to remove hearts from freshly dead or comatose donors. Anyway, it wasn’t unusual for him to leave the house in the early hours of the morning, so I didn’t think anything more about it except to feel sorry for him having to get out of his comfy bed.

  He didn’t get back home until the next morning, Sunday, when we were all in the breakfast room feasting on Constanza’s huevos rancheros. He was weary but hungry after his long night, so he joined us. That was how I heard the news about Jonny Freeman so quickly.

  “Where have you been?” my mother asked him.

  “I’ve been working on a fellow student of Lucy’s,” my dad answered. And I knew right away he was talking about Jonny. My appetite evaporated, and I began to feel sick with guilt. Had my visit caused his death somehow?

  “It was that boy that crashed his car off Bellagio last year, the one with all the horrific burns. It looks like his body rejected the last skin grafts, and he had some toxic reaction and died in the middle of the night.”

  Constanza put down a huge plate of Mexican eggs in front of him, but he kept on talking even as he dug in. “Actually, his doctors thought he had finally lost the will to live. The nurses reported him slipping into a coma around 1:00 a.m., and that’s when they called me. Jonny’s parents had signed the donor papers during the first week of his hospital stay, donating any of his undamaged and healthy organs. He still had a good heart, a healthy liver, and one good kidney.”

  “Oh, the poor boy!” sighed Constanza, listening to my dad as she heated up more of her tortillas.

  “Yes, his injuries had been so extensive it was a wonder he had survived at all. His doctors told me that when his injuries began to heal enough for the burn surgeons to work on rehabilitating him, it became evident that he was extremely depressed, although that wasn’t surprising in cases like his. Nevertheless, it only slowed down his recovery further.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I listened carefully, and I could only believe it was my visit that had sent him over the edge. He had certainly been weeping when I left him. But then the coach and Skywalker had visited him after me, and they had seen me leave his ward. Could they have done something to cause his death?

  I must have looked pretty sick because my dad tried to comfort me. “Don’t be sad, Lucy. At least his death ended his misery, and the donation of his organs saved a lot of other people from miserable deaths.”

  “What happens to his body now?” I asked.

  “Well, under the circumstances, an autopsy was deemed unnecessary. His parents had his body taken to Forest Lawn Cemetery after the surgery. He’s being cremated this morning. They’ll be holding a memorial service for him later this week. I think they’re just glad it’s all over.”

  “It’s just so sad!” was all I could muster, and I stumbled from the table and hurried to my room to e-mail Captain Greenberg and telephone Seth.

  CHAPTER 27

  LET’S HEAR IT FROM THE CHEERLEADERS

  AS SOON as I was finished giving Seth the rundown of my day, I called Wendy. I needed to call her because I was going to do exactly what Seth’s father told me to do, and that meant recruiting Wendy to be my chaperone whenever Seth wasn’t available. She was delighted, just as I thought she would be, and she came over that Sunday afternoon, and we talked some more about the cheerleading squad and how she should approach her friend Caroline and get her to tell her what was really going on.

  By that time, Caroline had already quit the cheerleading team—right in the middle of the season. The reason she gave was that it was affecting her grade point average, and she wanted to get into Stanford. She had also stopped hanging out with the other girls on the squad and joined the chess club instead! She remained friends with Wendy, but she stuck to her story about the routines being too difficult and how the practices were interfering with her studies. She still looked haggard and depressed, and Wendy said she thought Caroline had lost about twenty pounds since joining the squad.

  Right then, it looked like Wendy was Caroline’s only friend. So, what the heck, we decided she should call her right from my room and see if Caroline wanted to hang out with Wendy. As we suspected, Caroline seemed desperate to have Wendy’s company, and they made a date to meet up after school on Monday. We had to navigate around the buddy system, so we agreed Wendy would bring Caroline to her house, and we roped in Wendy’s mother to drive Caroline home afterward.

  Now, we just had to get through the school day in one piece, and I was feeling pretty shaky about walking the school corridors alone, so the next morning, Wendy drove me to school, and we met Seth in the school parking lot as usual. Everything seemed peaceful enough, and the day went pretty much like any other day. We just stuck closer together than we usually did, and Wendy joined me in my free periods in the seniors’ lounge whenever Seth wasn’t there. We all kept texting each other our whereabouts, but as the day wore on, I felt pretty safe, though I worried about Seth’s baseball practice and his situation in the boys’ locker room.

  Wendy and I had scraped together one hundred dollars from our spring clothing allowance to give to Seth for the steroids in case Carl approached him again. It seemed like the wisest plan of action if we were to keep him from looking suspicious or like a Goody Two-shoes. I made him promise to phone me as soon as he was safely out of there and on his way home.

  Wendy drove me home along with Caroline, and we chatted casually about our future school choices and didn’t bring up anything that was actually on our minds. I had to admit that, although I didn’t know Caroline at all, I would never have pegged her for a cheerleader. She was very thin and pale, with long, straight dark hair, a pleasant face, and a pretty but furtive smile. She looked nervous, as if she were ready to leap out of the car at any moment and seemed totally devoid of confidence.

  While I waited for Seth to
call me, I played mindless word games on my phone. When he finally did, it turned out everything was perfectly normal at the practice and in the locker room. Nobody paid any particular attention to him except to swoon over his fantastic curveball. And he deliberately left early before Carl Brandt could offer him any drugs. I promised to phone him back as soon as I heard anything from Wendy, and then I watched some reruns of Boston Legal and didn’t do any homework until I got her text at around 10:00 p.m.

  She was coming over in person to talk me to me, after her mother drove Caroline home. Her mother walked Wendy to our door, and my mother actually promised to drive Wendy back home again, even though she only lived five houses away; that’s how happy everyone was to see us being friends and how worried everyone was about the murders.

  Wendy and I grabbed a couple of Diet Cokes from the fridge and ran down to my room. She sat across from me, on the bed Carmen used to lie on, and before I could even ask a question, she began.

  “Oh, Lucy, it’s even worse than we could have imagined! Caroline told me that after Coach Billy came to the school, the cheerleading squad tryouts changed drastically. They still had the three weeks of intense practice, where everyone who wanted to be on the squad had to learn one routine, and they still had to choreograph their own routine and perform it for the final tryouts. But after that, it got ugly.”

  “What do you mean?’ I asked.

  “Normally, the final tryouts consisted of how well they performed that one routine and how original their own routine was. After that, each of the finalists was interviewed by the captain of the squad and the captain of the football team, followed by an interview with the coach. The difference this year was that the interview with the coach was a private interview, held in his office behind locked doors!”

  “No!” I exclaimed, feeling a familiar nausea coming on.