Lew frowned, then looked back down at the e-mail.
“Let’s not panic yet,” he said. “We’ll follow up, see what it’s about. There could be a reasonable explanation. It doesn’t say anything specifically inappropriate.”
Kate stared at Lew in silence until he looked up. He nodded.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I agree, it needs explaining.”
Upstairs in her small office, Kate took a seat in the desk chair in front of the sleeping computer screen.
“Okay,” she said, waving for Lew to proceed. She was nauseated. “Let’s get this over with.”
Lew moved the mouse until the screen clicked to life. And there was Amelia wearing nothing but pink lace underwear and a matching push-up bra. She was leaning suggestively over the desk chair in her bedroom, rear end toward the camera.
“Oh my God!” Kate gasped, shielding her eyes with a hand. She thought for a second about looking again, making sure of what she’d seen. But she couldn’t possibly. That sexy girl vamping for the camera had been Amelia. There was no question about it. Kate shuddered hard, trying to dislodge the image from her mind. “Turn it off! Please, turn it off!”
Lew reached forward and switched off the monitor.
“What was that?” Kate shouted.
“The blog she was posting to,” Lew said glumly. He seemed mortified.
“Amelia took a picture like that and posted it where anybody could see it?!” Kate shouted, as if it had been Lew who’d told Amelia to do it.
“Not anyone,” Lew said gently. “Someone would have to know Amelia’s alias to find her.”
Kate was going to throw up, right there on the keyboard. Was her daughter a secret prostitute or something? An exhibitionist? What on earth would possess her to take half-naked pictures of herself, much less post them online? It was the kind of thing that— No, it was not the kind of thing that anyone did.
“How many people saw this? Can you tell?”
Because maybe it wasn’t as awful as it seemed. Ten, fifteen—these were the numbers jumping around Kate’s head. That wouldn’t be great, but it wasn’t the same as working at an escort service. This could just be what kids did these days, too—saw one another in their underwear. Maybe it was the new safe sex: get naked on the Internet so you didn’t have to in real life. Not that Kate really believed that. There was nothing healthy about those pictures that were now burned into her memory.
“There are one thousand two hundred and eighty-eight notes.”
“What?” Kate had forgotten what they had been talking about.
“You asked how many people had seen this,” Lew said reluctantly. “That’s how many people ‘liked’ her picture. Some wrote comments.”
“More than a thousand people saw these pictures?” Kate asked, her eyes so wide they were burning.
“This—whatever it is—was bigger than just Amelia,” Lew said, ignoring her question, probably because the answer was that even more than that had. “There are more than two dozen girls in this group.”
“Group?”
“Birds of a Feather. From what I can tell, there was some sort of ranking system in place, almost like a game.”
“A game? With pictures like this? Oh my God, that’s sick.” Suddenly Kate was furious. “We have to find these girls. We have to tell their parents exactly what they’re doing. This isn’t right. This wasn’t Amelia’s idea. Somebody put her up to it.”
“Agreed, but I expect all the names on here are aliases. Do you have some kind of yearbook or something we could cross-reference to get the girls’ real names?”
“There’s a meet book, with all the students pictures. It’s online.”
As Kate went to her bedroom to get her laptop to compare the pictures side by side, all she could think about was the possibility that Amelia really had killed herself after all. If she’d gotten mixed up with something like this, posing half naked, maybe she’d felt so guilty and embarrassed she couldn’t live with it anymore.
When Kate came back into her office, Lew was on the phone.
“Yeah, okay,” he said quietly, rubbing his forehead. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
His jaw was clenched as he hung up.
“What’s wrong?” Kate asked.
She’d been bracing herself for him to get a call, pulling him off the case, telling him his time could be better spent elsewhere. But not now. Not after seeing those pictures. Lew took a deep breath, his hand still on his forehead.
“If you give me the site and password for that meet book, I can do the cross-checking myself tonight,” he said. “You’d probably be better off not seeing the rest of the pictures anyway.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home. This past summer my wife had a stroke,” Lew said quietly. He shook his head as he stared at the ground. When he looked up at Kate, his eyes were watery. “When she has a bad day, I’m the only one she’ll listen to. Half the time, I’m not even sure she knows who I am, but she listens anyway. That was her home-care nurse. Sounds like today was a really bad day.”
Kate blinked at him. She wished she was the kind of person who’d put a stroke victim ahead of her own anxiety. But all she wanted to do was grab onto Lew’s pant leg and beg him to stay, to not leave her side until she knew all the awfulness about Amelia there was left to discover.
“Okay,” she managed out. “Yes, I mean, of course. Do you know maybe when you’ll be back?”
“First thing in the morning,” Lew said. He paused in front of Kate in the doorway, looking her straight in the eye. His face softened then in a way Kate hadn’t seen it before. She could imagine it was the way he looked at his own grown children, firmness overlaid with warmth. It made her want to cry. “Try not to worry. We’re going to figure out what happened to her.”
After Lew had gone, Kate resisted the temptation to go back on the Birds of a Feather blog. It wasn’t hard. She couldn’t possibly stomach seeing those pictures of Amelia again, not ever.
Kate returned instead to her boxes. She needed to finish looking through Amelia’s e-mails. Specifically, she wanted to see whether there were any more from Woodhouse. There could be an innocent explanation for one such e-mail. Perhaps. But not for more than one.
By the time Kate had gone through all of the messages, the sun had gone down. The living room was dark except for the pale circle of light from the standing lamp next to the couch. It cast a fuzzy halo over the coffee table where Kate had put all the e-mails she’d found from Woodhouse.
There were seventeen in all.
Kate had spread them out over her coffee table like some kind of terrible patchwork quilt, then crossed her arms and stared down at them. Most of the messages were brief, a sentence or two, asking Amelia to meet with Woodhouse, to think about what he’d said or to think about what she was doing. But in one, he almost seemed to be threatening her. THINK ABOUT YOUR FUTURE, AMELIA. THIS COULD COST YOU.
Amelia had responded, by e-mail, only two times, with almost as few words: OKAY and WHAT TIME.
Could there have been something between Amelia and Woodhouse—an affair, sexual harassment, something? Kate had met him the day Amelia died. Apparently, they’d had a whole conversation that Kate had absolutely no recollection of. He’d been at the funeral, too. Kate did remember that much, but everything that day had been a blur. She closed her eyes and tried to picture Woodhouse. He’d been young, hadn’t he? Attractive even? Kate had a flash of hipster glasses and shaggy, art-house hair. If she was even picturing the right person. For sure, Woodhouse had an impressive background—a Fulbright scholarship and a master’s degree from Harvard in public policy and education, which he’d gotten around the same time as Kate had gotten her law degree. She remembered reading about him in the bulletin Grace Hall had sent around when he became headmaster. But who said a guy with a great résumé couldn’t also be a pedophile?
There was a knock at the front door then, once, then three times much harder. It was impatien
t, aggressive almost. Kate stood up from the couch and, with her arms wrapped tight around her, walked hesitantly through the darkness to the door. She didn’t turn on the light. She wasn’t ready yet to announce that she was home.
Bam! Bam! Bam! The knocking came again when she was almost at the door.
Kate’s stomach was tight as she leaned to look through the peephole. There, on the stoop, was Seth, arms crossed, jaw clenched. When Kate swung open the door, his hand was raised as if he were about to pound again. He looked relieved for a second, then angry.
“No. Not allowed, not these days,” he scolded, striding inside past her. “Do you know how many times I’ve called you today?”
“No, I’ve—”
“Twelve,” Seth snapped. “I left you twelve messages. But do you bother to call me back? No, of course not. I had to make Thomas leave work at six thirty to go meet the nanny so I could come here to check on you. Do you know how early six thirty is at McCann Erikson? It’s like taking a half day. Let’s just say that Thomas is pissed at me for impinging on his workaholic persona and, by extension, he is also pissed at you. Now, what could possibly be your excuse for not calling me back?” Seth looked around the room. “And why are you sitting here in the dark? I’ve told you before that’ll depress you. There are actual studies that—”
Seth fell silent as Kate’s face began to melt. A second later she was sobbing.
“Oh my,” Seth said, stepping forward and wrapping his arms around her. “Okay, okay. You can sit in the dark if you want to, honey. And screw Thomas. Lola’s his daughter, too. He can climb down from his ivory tower to pick her up for once. Come on now, what you need is a drink.”
Twenty minutes later, wineglasses in hand—and with Seth up to speed on everything—they were staring down at the pages covering Kate’s coffee table.
“It is a tad Lolita,” Seth said. “What are you going to do?”
Kate shook her head. “Find out why he sent them, I guess.”
“Are you sure it matters?” Seth asked.
“What do you mean? Of course it matters.”
“Listen, Kate, you know I love you, right?”
Kate glared at him for a second, knowing he was about to say something she didn’t want to hear. “I guess so.”
“And you know I loved Amelia.”
She nodded.
“I get wanting to know that Amelia’s death wasn’t a suicide,” he said. “But if you already know it, why do you have to prove it? And to whom?”
Kate could tell Seth still thought that Amelia’s death had been a suicide, though. That he thought all of this searching was just part of Kate’s healing process. Necessary, perhaps, but ultimately futile.
“She was my daughter. The only one I will ever have and—”
“Listen, I know what that means, with Lola now, especially. But—”
“You think I should let it drop. That if somebody killed Amelia, I should just let them off the hook?”
Seth shook his head and frowned. His usually snappy demeanor was muted now, almost completely.
“I’m saying that you should let yourself off the hook,” he said quietly. “None of this is going to bring Amelia back, and it might drive you right off the edge. What if you learn something about her and this Woodhouse character that is creepy and terrible, but doesn’t have anything to do with why she died? Then what? I’m just saying that Amelia would want you to take care of you, too. I want you to take care of you.”
He was right, of course, about her learning awful things. She had already learned things she wished she could purge from her memory. Kate’s cell phone vibrated on the coffee table then, making a loud hollow sound against the wood. She and Seth both turned to look at it, then back at each other. Kate didn’t move.
Without her asking him to, Seth got up to check her phone. “It’s just a voice mail,” he said, handing it to her.
It was from Daniel.
“I just want to make sure you’re not worried about the whole Associated thing,” Daniel’s recorded voice said. He was trying to sound cheerful. He didn’t. He sounded wound up, if not exactly angry. “I saw the writing on the wall a long time ago. I’m never going to win Jeremy over. That’s why I’m headed to Meyers, Jenkins in a few weeks. They offered me this insane equity partnership deal, too. So I’m all good, trust me. In the meantime, I’m headed to Scotland to go golfing, if you can believe it. I haven’t taken a vacation in two years. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll see you around. Take care, Kate, and congratulations. You deserve it.”
Kate kept the phone up against her ear for a minute after the message had ended. Daniel gone to another firm after all these years trying to claw his way to the top of Slone, Thayer? Out of her life, just like that. She was relieved, but something else, too. Unsettled. Deserve it. That was the part of what Daniel had said that she didn’t like. He didn’t think anyone deserved anything good but him.
“Who was it?” Seth asked, not falling for Kate’s phone-to-the-ear routine. “Jeremy want you to come in so you can scrape gum off his shoe?” He lifted his hands in the air and waved them around. “Oh Kate! Help me! Help me! I can’t touch my shoes with my lily-white hands.”
“Are you done?” Kate asked.
Seth took a sip of his wine and sighed. “I suppose.”
“Anyway, it was Daniel, not Jeremy.”
“Oh boy,” Seth said. “Even better. What did Captain Corporate Crusader have to say for himself today? Did he climb over some old ladies to get to a bag of cash? Or maybe he threw some puppies into the river in exchange for a chance to first chair a trial.”
“I thought you were done?”
Seth shrugged. “Daniel deserves it. You know, I ran into him at an alumni event last year and he said he was considering a class action to stop Human Rights Watch from soliciting donations on his block.”
“I’m sure he was joking,” Kate said.
Seth raised an eyebrow. “That makes one of us. You know, I’ve heard rumors that his ex-wife, Gail, had to seek inpatient treatment after their divorce.”
“Now you’re just making things up.”
“Maybe, but come on. Daniel definitely exploits people. You know that better than anyone. He’s been taking liberties with you ever since you and he—”
“Can you please not remind me?”
“Sorry,” Seth said, looking chastised.
Kate’s phone vibrated again, in her hand.
“Daniel is not calling you again, is he?”
“It’s not a voice mail, it’s a text,” she said, though she’d only glanced at her phone. “Will you read it, please?”
She handed the phone back to Seth. He snatched it from her and looked down, as if he were going to sort this nonsense out once and for all. But as he read, his face slowly sank.
“Read it,” Kate said.
“Kate, I don’t think— It’s only two words. Who knows what it—”
“Seth, please.” He took a breath and fidgeted in his chair, like he was trying to buy time.
“Okay, okay, fine,” he said quietly, lifting the phone up to read. He took another short, loud breath. “ ‘Fucking whore.’ ”
gRaCeFULLY
OCTOBER 10TH
* * *
Because there are 176 definitions for the word loser on urbandictionary.com.
Don’t Be a Statistic
* * *
So, there’s dissension in the ranks of the chess club, everyone . . .
We know, we know, who wants to hear about those dorks right? But wait, this is seriously good. Apparently, a certain young lady on the team known for her aggressive style of, um, gamesmanship (okay, it’s Ainsley Brown) turned up late for her match at Horace Mann last Saturday because she was otherwise occupied in the lavatory with a certain male opponent from Stuyvesant. Word is that the opponent was more than happy to throw the match in exchange for services rendered.
School administration officials claim they are narrowing in on the sticky-finge
red cad who lifted two of the school’s new iPads. It’s either those lame asses from Wolf’s Gate or the Gamblers Anonymous chemistry prof, Mr. Hale. In which case I hope they fire his ass, ideally before he grades my last test.
And the Maggies are at it again. This time there’s pictures and a blog involved. I don’t have the deets, but I bet they are sweet.
Also, looks like both Ian Greene and Dylan Crosby have wandering eyes. We knew, poor Sylvia, that your hours were numbered. And Dylan seems to be wandering to somebody at LONG last. Details will follow.
Check me back later, people. I’ll have more mad scoop.
Amelia
OCTOBER 13, 8:47 PM
DYLAN
u free 2morrow
AMELIA
def what time?
DYLAN
after schl
AMELIA
what d u want to do?
DYLAN
hang out; park maybe; movies
AMELIA
like a date
DYLAN
sure, I guess
AMELIA
sounds good c/u ltr
OCTOBER 13, 9:03 PM
BEN
what’s up?
AMELIA
nada how r u?
BEN
fine; u talk to your mom?
AMELIA
not yet; still on fence
BEN
why?
AMELIA
did u tell your parents right away?
BEN
pretty much
AMELIA
and they were cool?
BEN
dad came around faster than mom
AMELIA
my mom wld be cool, but its still weird; like a bad sex talk
BEN
yeah, but u will feel better after, trust me
AMELIA
maybe; I’ve g2g. ltr xo
OCTOBER 13, 9:11 PM
SYLVIA
did you see the last gracefully?
AMELIA
Not yet, why?
SYLVIA
I just read it and it said that Ian’s eyes are wandering WTF!!!
AMELIA
100 percent of the crap on there is a total lie . . .
Reconstructing Amelia Page 17