Trial Run Page 12
“God, I hope not,” I said. “Remember what happened to them.”
As we padded back to the kitchen, David paused at the foot of the stairs, listening for a minute to reassure himself that all was quiet on the floor above.
“Does he sleepwalk?” I said.
David frowned. “It isn’t sleepwalking exactly,” he said. “He’s conscious when he does it, at least as conscious as he ever gets these days. He just wanders around like he’s looking for something and can’t remember where he put it.”
I made a sympathetic sound. “My Mom did that. It used to scare me to death because she wouldn’t stay in the house. Twice I had to call the police. The neighbors were great, though. After the second time, they formed a ‘Maggie Watch’ to bring her home whenever she went out wandering.”
David said, “Quite an emotional investment.”
I shrugged. “Eventually you learn how to protect yourself.”
“From?”
“Your feelings. You learn how not to have too many, so things don’t bother you as much. The only trouble is, if you get really practiced at it, you tend to lose some of the good feelings, too. Let alone your ability to read other people’s.”
We were standing very close together. David slid his arms around me and tilted my face up to his. “Not to worry,” he said. “You’ve done a pretty good job reading mine.”
• • •
We were sitting at opposite ends of the couch, feet touching, and coffee cups instead of brandy glasses in our hands.
It was hard to escape the feeling that, with the death of Randy Outray, justice had been served, and a moral order, of a sort, restored. Had he died from lingering illness, or in the swift horror of an accident, I would have thought no further than that. But as long as the police suspected David of his murder, the ledger could not be closed. So, for over an hour, David and I had sifted through what we knew to be fact and what we dismissed as conjecture, from the time Susan and Tracey had met Randy Outray in the woods, to the moment he was discovered floating in his own swimming pool.
“It always comes back to motive,” David said. “Who besides me had a strong enough motive to kill him?”
“What about some of the nutbars that were out parading in front of his house? One of them could have done it as easily as you.”
“Vigilante justice?” David said doubtfully.
“Why not? It’s no different from guys shooting doctors who perform abortions, or the neighborhood watch blowing up a crack house the police can’t close down.”
“I’d like to believe that. But, Nina, I have to tell you, those people out there were not like that. Their idea of a hostile act was throwing eggs on the windows, for God’s sake. Besides, if any of them had had a gun, the police would have found it.”
“They didn’t find yours,” I said.
He looked startled.
“What are you supposed to have done with it? Thrown it in the bushes, right? Well, that’s exactly what one of the nutbars would have done, too. The police will find it, your fingerprints won’t be on it, one of theirs will. End of story.”
David looked unconvinced.
He said, “Don’t most of these activist types want to advertise? What kind of statement can you make if you don’t claim responsibility for the act?”
“Maybe they panicked. Maybe the reality of shooting someone didn’t match the vision. I don’t know. Who else could it have been?”
“Randy Outray was a psychotic son of a bitch. It wouldn’t surprise me if people were standing in line to take a shot at him.”
Snippets of gossip drifted into my mind; Sonja Reid hinting at past transgressions, telling me how Randy’s family had bailed him out of trouble more than once before.
Had past trouble led to this present tragedy?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The coffee we drank at midnight was no proof against the brandy. I fell asleep on the couch shortly afterward and woke there early in the morning, cozily tucked into a quilt David must have wrapped around me.
He was already up and showered. He offered to cook us both breakfast but I thought it best to leave before Ian or the cleaning lady put in an appearance.
The policeman outside had moved to the other side of the street. Whether it was in fact the same car and driver as the night before I didn’t know and it didn’t matter; his purpose hadn’t altered.
The man’s being there gave my departure an almost clandestine air that harkened back to high school days and illicit nights out. I felt torn between running for my car with my head down or thumbing my nose at the watcher. In the end, I did neither. David kissed me goodbye on the doorstep like a husband seeing his wife off to work and I drove off with only a passing glance at the man in the green car.
I went straight home. Before stepping into the shower, I put a pot of coffee on, so it was ready when I came back to the kitchen fifteen minutes later dressed in sweats and slippers. I drank the first mug while I toasted a bagel and laid my plans.
I am not a person who interferes readily in other people’s lives. I have sat on the sidelines of my own too long to feel comfortable with a leading role in someone else’s. One part of me insisted there was nothing to be done; no one would thank me for intervening in something that had nothing to do with me. Another part argued as strongly that whatever I could do for David must be done; his own hands were tied as much by Ian as the police. I sat at the harvest table, pushing crumbs around my plate and staring blindly into the sunshine streaming through the window. Sonja Reid’s allusions to the past were all I had to go on, but maybe pulling on that thread would untangle the whole skein of trouble.
Decision brought a sense of relief so vivid it was almost physical. On the wave of it, I headed out to do some research.
I spent the day at the library, perusing the newspaper archives. Every so often, I had stopped reading long enough to print a copy of what was on the screen. Journalists had been circumspect in their reporting. Still, I picked up enough hints to piece together a couple of telling incidents.
Had I not known of Sonja’s involvement in the Youth Development Project, I would have had no idea where to begin looking. As it was, it was easy. All I had to do was set a trace on the YDP. It led me soon enough to the kind of episode I was looking for. Due to the age of the participants, and, I supposed, the influence of the people involved, names were not often mentioned, but the insider information I had picked up over the years filled in the gaps and Sonja’s bits of gossip didn’t hurt.
I knew when Sonja had been named to the board of YDP. I vaguely remembered the hoopla over its inception. Two years ago or so, something had ruffled the feathers of Kingsport’s upright city council. The details of whatever it was had been shuffled aside and forgotten amid the fanfare of the Project getting off the ground. It made sense to start my search a few months prior to that date, when funding would have been approved and reasons given for calling the Project into being.
Amid the usual political rhetoric, I found the reference I was looking for. It led me to a story that was buried before it got off the ground.
One fine summer morning, a young man (name withheld) had turned in a video to the police. He had rented it the night before from the Video Shoppe downtown, which stocks the usual run of romance and adventure flicks on its main shelves, and offers an eclectic assortment of erotica in the back room. The video in question had come from the back room. The young man had selected it, along with two others, on his way to a friend’s stag party. There had been perhaps twenty guys at the party. By midnight, most of them were a little the worse for the beer they had consumed, but still game for the third and final feature of the night. The first two had been run of the mill films, short on plot and long on close ups of explicit sex between consenting partners of various persuasions. The third was entirely different.
The young man who had brought the film in squirmed as he looked at the two police officers with whom he had just viewed it for the second time.
“You see what I mean?” he said. “It looks so real. I mean, maybe she’s an actress, maybe it was all a joke, but … it just looks so real.”
The police officers agreed. To them, it looked like murder.
They tried to match the girl on the screen to descriptions of girls reported missing, with no result. No unclaimed bodies in the morgue resembled her. The girl looked about fifteen years old. The police canvassed area schools and youth hangouts until they stumbled on the right one and someone said, “That’s Julie. She lives over on the Heights.”
Two officers went to Julie’s home, prepared to break a parent’s heart. When they knocked at the door, it was Julie who answered.
At first, she denied all knowledge of the video.
The police were adamant.
Under pressure from them and from her parents, Julie changed her story. Reading it made me feel very old.
The social pyramid at Julie’s school was dominated by a dozen of Kingsport’s more privileged youth, who had banded together to form a club they called The King’s Sports. The sport they pursued was sex for points, with points awarded according to the degree of difficulty in persuading a given target to cooperate, and the kind of sex ultimately performed. Proof had to be tangible, preferably in video format. Refusal to participate in the game made a girl a social pariah. Rumor and innuendo, harassment in the halls and swimming pool, had all been used to good effect more than once. At least one of Julie’s classmates had been hounded from the school. Julie could not afford to follow. So she gave in, to what she thought at first would be straight sex with a guy who, though she didn’t like him, was “at least not a total geek. Kids are going to do it anyway,” she was quoted as saying, “so what difference does it make who it’s with?”
Her words were desperately nonchalant. I found them appalling, not least because I suspected she believed them.
Julie had protested the video recording, been frightened at being tied up, and had panicked absolutely at the appearance of the gun. “But it wasn’t real, so it’s no big deal, right?”
She refused to press charges, and the story died.
Two weeks later, the Youth Development Project had been officially called into being. Its lofty purpose was to “impart to the youth of our city a sense of civic commitment and moral responsibility through community service works.” Initial funding for this noble enterprise had come from none other than John Randall Outray II, father of Randy and Simone.
A week or so later an edict had come down from the Board of Education, outlawing the formation of private clubs or secret societies within the schools. Any student caught violating this order faced automatic expulsion.
I needed a coffee. Actually, I needed a drink, but the bars weren’t open yet and I didn’t feel like going all the way home. A glance around the half-empty room persuaded me I wasn’t in any danger of being desk-less when I returned, so I decided to go to the coffee shop next door for a break. Stretching the kinks out of my neck, I rose and gathered my printouts together and put them in my bag.
Coffee with Cream did most of its business in take-out but for those who preferred to linger, there was a scatter of tables and chairs. Early morning was my favorite time to stop by, when the cranberry muffins were still hot out of the oven and the bustling activity of people on their way to work lent the illusion I belonged to a bigger whole. This would be my second visit of the day.
It was just past eleven when I went in. Jana looked up in surprise from the beans she was grinding.
“Well, hi. Again. Do you need another muffin fix?”
“Just coffee. I’m a one-muffin-a-day girl. Let me try some of that new blend, what do you call it? Mocha Java Jive. It sounds too racy for first thing in the morning, but I think I can handle it now.”
I took my coffee to a seat by the window. A handful of women had commandeered three of the tables around it. Judging by the casual clothes they were wearing and the fatigue lining some of their faces, I guessed they were the stay-at-home moms of young children. The kids were probably at Storytime next door or the play school down the block. The very ordinariness of it all made the story I had just read seem that much more surreal. I wondered how these mothers would react if, ten or twelve years hence, their children made snuff films for kicks. Their chatter skated over cartoons, preschool programs, and street-proofing. The voice of a frail brunette who looked far too young to be anybody’s mother, rose above the rest.
“Well, I can tell you right now, if anyone ever so much as touched Dustin, I’d kill him.”
“An eye for an eye?” someone said, trying for levity. “Tsk. Tsk. That’s politically incorrect, you know.”
“Don’t you believe it. Vengeance is what the judicial system is all about. It’s just that now, instead of going out and evening up the score yourself, there’s some nice, impersonal machinery in place to get your eye for you.”
“Retribution without personal guilt.”
“Why not, they’ve got guilt-free everything else these days. Speaking of which, have you tried those new guiltless potato chips?”
“Tried them? I ate a whole bag yesterday afternoon. Don’t talk to me about guilt-free.” And the conversation slipped easily back into things that really matter.
I left Coffee with Cream a few minutes later.
My study carrel had been taken over by a girl in a short black skirt and a pair of thick-soled shoes that made her legs look as skinny as Olive Oyl’s. I had noticed her earlier, sitting on the other side of the room, and I supposed she had moved to take advantage of the natural light from the window. I retreated to the spot she had vacated and went back to work.
My second lead was more difficult to trace. I wanted to know what had prompted Randy’s withdrawal from college. The fact that whatever it was had resulted in a donation large enough, according to Sonja, to finance a new library, meant it had to be serious enough for some fairly elaborate camouflage. Granite College would have wanted its good name protected as much as the Outrays did theirs.
The story would not have appeared in the Barker. Not only did Granite lie outside its natural sphere, the Barker’s loyalty to the Outrays had always been unquestioned. But I couldn’t believe the Express would have passed it up. Its publisher, Milo Rajacic, had a workingman’s disdain for the moneyed upper class, and his reporters were specially trained to sniff out tidbits to discredit them. His scope was statewide, his nose unerring.
New Hampshire roughly resembles a right triangle, with its longest side running north to south. Rolling foothills slope down to the Atlantic Ocean on the southeast, while the north is cut by the several ranges of the White Mountains. For the most part, the granite for which the state is nicknamed resisted the advance of the glaciers. Where the ice did manage to cut through, it left a series of ruggedly scenic notches, in one of which Hawthorne’s Old Man in the Mountain scowls. In another, lies the town of Wells, where Granite College was established in 1905. It is a private school, attended by the sons and daughters of the wealthy, who began flocking to the area when the lavish Mt. Washington Hotel opened at the turn of the century. Nearby Bretton Woods enjoyed its resort-town heyday in the pre-depression years, when as many as fifty trains arri
ved every day and private railroad cars sat on a siding by the golf course, waiting to take their passengers home. It seemed a fitting place for the 1944 meeting of the World Monetary Fund, at which they set the gold standard at thirty-five dollars an ounce, and established the American dollar as the cornerstone of international financial exchange.
Ten miles down the road, the College reflected this stellar past.
I opened an Internet search on the Outrays and found nothing remotely incriminating, then tried the College, with the same result. What about the town of Wells itself? I tapped the name into the computer and was rewarded with a dozen listings. I pulled all of them and read them through, discarding most as irrelevant. Three held my attention.
The byline on all of these belonged to a Daily Express reporter well known for her dogged pursuit of a story. In this case, she had tried her best on three separate occasions to stir up controversy, but no one had been buying and the story finally died. Once again, it centered on sex and videos.
The basic premise was the same as that in the high school efforts, but the product was aesthetically superior and the age of the female participants considerably advanced. These were not schoolgirls, motivated by curiosity or fear of rejection. These were affluent, bored housewives, attracted by the youth and vigor of the college boys and more than willing to participate in an afternoon of uninhibited, and they hoped anonymous, sex. Their shock at finding Afternoon Encounters for sale was total.
This was the ripple that had alerted the prescient Express reporter. Unfortunately, she didn’t move fast enough. The wives in question presented a solid wall of “no comment” beyond which she could not penetrate. Though she managed somehow to obtain a copy of Afternoon Encounters, and even to identify one of the women, the male lead had been careful never to show his face to the camera. His partner flatly refused to name him. Curious, I searched the files for any other reference to her, and found a brief social note describing her plans for an extended trip abroad.
I went back to the list of stories about the College and found several references to the generous donation that was making the new library possible. Randy Outray was not mentioned, but the timing was right. I was convinced he had masterminded Afternoon Encounters.