Complicit (9 page)

“Don't worry about it,” Scooter said. “Like I said, Cate scares me. She's got a real temper on her.”

I pulled my attention away from Danny and Gwen. Of course Cate
did
have a temper on her, but that wasn't his place to say. “And you know this how?”

“Sarah told me.”

“Sarah who?”

“Ciorelli.”

I made a face. Sarah? What could
she
know? Sarah Ciorelli was the most spoiled, blue-blooded, know-it-all girl in our class. And like me, Scooter
used
to go out of his way to avoid her. Until recently, that is, a behavioral shift that came roughly around the time Sarah grew boobs. Really big boobs. I didn't like Sarah, but even I had a hard time not thinking about her chest, a revelation that taught me one of the first paradoxes of attraction: How much you liked a person didn't always correlate with how much you might want them.

“Sarah doesn't know Cate,” I said finally.

Scooter looked at me. “Yes she does. They ride at the same barn. A bunch of girls around here do. Sarah says Cate's like their idol, on account of how good a jumper she is. But—”

“But…”

His voice dropped as he leaned closer to me, one hand still on the chain-link fence. “Sarah says Cate does weird things with them, sometimes. Real crazy shit.”

“Weird things?”

“Like taking them out into the woods and having them lie naked on the ground while she puts them into these trances. And if they don't listen to her and do exactly as she says, she goes insane. Like crazy mad … screaming. Throwing things.”

Okay, well, throwing things, that did sound like Cate. But
naked trances
? That sounded like bullshit. “Come on, Scoot. You don't seriously believe that.”

He nodded gravely. “It's true,” he said. “Ask Sarah.”

“I will.”

Scooter's expression turned wistful. “God, I'd love to see Sarah ride a horse.”

 

 

“An acorn fell on her head once during a meditation and Cate totally lost it. Called us all evil little witches. Like we were the ones who made it fall.” Sarah Ciorelli lay stomach down on a lounge chair by the pool in Scooter's backyard with her slim ankles crossed behind her. Scooter had gone inside to get some drinks, and I'd been left trying to coax information out of Sarah. This was no mean feat, considering one, she didn't like me very much, and two I was having a hell of a time trying to ignore the magnetic effect her bathing suit was having on the lower half of my body. I might as well have been trying to ignore the laws of gravity or the need for oxygen.

“Why, that doesn't sound like Cate,” I said, reaching up to wipe the beads of sweat running down my brow.

Sarah laughed. “Either you're more clueless than I thought or you don't know your sister very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you slow? I mean she's fucking crazy, babe. Like a loon. Loony tunes.”

I blinked. Very quickly. “Well, what are these meditations for?”

“What are they
for
? Relaxing, I guess. Finding inner peace? Some kind of New Age crap. Who knows? I'm not your fucking therapist, Jamie. Don't make me interpret shit for you.”

“Scooter said something about trances.”

“Yeah, she's into hypnosis.”

“Hypnosis?”

“Inductions, whatever.” Sarah fiddled with her earrings so that they made a jangling sound. “She's good at it, too. I'll give her that. Said she taught herself how to do it in order to help someone she knew, only it didn't work out or she gave up or something. But she can get people to
do
things. She got Lacey Braden to quit biting her nails and she got Alicia Dahl to have her first orgasm.”

I sputtered. “
Cate
did that?”

“Well, Cate says
they
did it, not her. She says all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. It's just a matter of being suggestible.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling both horrified and confused because I didn't believe in hypnosis at all. It ranked right up there with street magic and faith healing in terms of things I knew I'd never be dumb enough to fall for. But also, hold up—girls had to
learn
how to have an orgasm? My world was rocked. To the goddamn core.

“Obviously,
I
never did anything like that.” Sarah wriggled herself off her elbows. My eyes, with a mind of their own, made me glance down her top, embarrassing me so much that I looked away quicker than the time I walked in on Grandma Karlsson in the bathroom.

“Obviously,” I said. “Tell me what else she does.”

“Don't get bossy with me, Jamie. I don't like that. Use a nice tone.”

“Please.”

Sarah peered at me over her Armani sunglasses. “That's better.”

My stomach twisted in a way that made me feel sick, but I said nothing. I wanted to, of course.

But I didn't.

“Anyhoo,” she went on. “One time she brought this hookah to pass around. My asthma was acting up so I only smoked a little, but in my head I was thinking, oh, it's just hash, you know? No big deal. Come to find out she'd put
opium
in there. Guess you can't take the ghetto out of the girl, right? Well, after everyone's wasted, Cate whips out her iPod and turns on some African drumming track. She starts dancing around, really shaking her ass, saying that something in the actual rhythm of the music is capable of altering our brain waves. We just have to
let it.
She called it a shamanic journey and said we'd all find our own personal power animal if we were ready.”

I was aghast. “You're serious? She did that?”

“Yup. Some of the girls swear they saw her levitate. For just, like, a second.”

Um, okay. Well, that was about the dumbest thing I'd heard yet. I turned and waved as Scooter opened the back door and came out with his arms full of Coke and Otter Pops. Then I looked back at Sarah.

“So did you?” I asked.

“Did I what?”

“Find your power animal.”

“Nah, I fell asleep. Cate found hers, though. She told us.”

“What was she?”

“A tigress.”

TWENTY

I'm still sitting at the piano in the living room as the light starts to change, day fading to night. The timer throws on our exterior Christmas lights and tiny white stars bounce around outside. They should be cheery, warm, full of nostalgia. Instead, a heavy sense of gloom settles in my bones the way dust and mites have settled into the folds of the velvet drapes that line the room. Twilight depresses me. It always has.

I don't bother with the tree inside. It's fake anyway.

I replay my earlier phone conversation with Cate. I should be used to her rage by now, but that doesn't mean I have to like or accept it. Other people don't act that way—totally irrational, without any thought to consequence or caution. Dr. Waverly told me once that while you can't control having an emotional
reaction
to something, it's always possible to control how you
respond.
I don't think Cate gets that, though. Or else she doesn't care.

As I get up from the piano bench and stretch my legs, it dawns on me that while I'm pretty sure Hector heard it from Danny, I still haven't figured out how my own parents knew Cate was out. They said it wasn't the courts that contacted them. So who was it? This question gnaws at me, like a dog at a bone. There are a couple of ways I could try and find out the answer, but since we've been studying Occam's razor at school, I choose the simplest.

Sneaking into Angie's second-floor office isn't a difficult thing to do. It's not like she locks the door or anything. What's hard is swallowing my feelings of subversiveness. I mean, I'm not perfect, but most of the time, I go out of my way not to break rules. Why should I go looking for trouble?

Except when you do.

I ignore the voice inside my head, that little whisper of my guilt and shame, and I fire up the Mac. While waiting, I rifle through Angie's desk a little, looking to see if maybe Cate sent a Hallmark card from juvie announcing her release and everyone just forgot to share the good news with me. But there's nothing. I do find a picture of Madison, though, in a small gold frame. That's sad to look at. She was a cute girl with brown hair and a silly grin, the kind of kid you want to buy stale cookies from or teach to ride a bike. Angie was there when they died, when the train clipped the back of her minivan. But sort of like when my mom got shot in front of her two small children, the train accident is something I've never asked or wondered about. Some horrors aren't meant to be recalled.

The log-in screen appears on the monitor. It asks for a password.

I try the obvious things, like Madison and Graham and my own name and even Cate's. Nothing works. Not the name of Angie's Dutch Warmblood, Athena. Not her birthday or Malcolm's. Not the date the four of us went to the county courthouse and finalized our adoption, nearly a full year after Cate and I moved to Danville.

Then an idea comes to me. I don't like it … but what do I have to lose?

I take out my phone and navigate to the local news site. Here I search for Angie's name. The train crash and following lawsuit were big stories at the time, unlike my mother's death, which didn't warrant anything more than a blip on the police blotter. Rich people dying, though: That's another matter altogether. Especially when kids are involved.

I find the archived story. I look for the date of the accident.

04/12/2001

I type the eight digits into the password box.

The desktop loads.

I exhale.

Maybe some horrors aren't meant to be recalled, but it's clear Angie is nowhere close to forgetting.

TWENTY-ONE

I didn't ignore what Sarah Ciorelli told me about Cate and those girls. Not at all. After hearing about the weird things my sister had done, I'd stormed right home. I had to know if Sarah was telling the truth. Not just about the drugs and random acts of cultural appropriation. But about the way she made the girls listen to her. About her
power.

I tore Cate's room apart. She was bad at hiding things.

Or else she didn't care if they were found.

In the bottom of her closet I found a tin of organic breath mints, rotted shut with organic mold, and a half-empty bottle of rum. Bacardi something. I unscrewed the top, smelled it, and made a face. Awful. In the back of her desk drawer she had a bag of weed and two pipes. One was metal, but the other was made of glass, all swirly with purples and blues, like a bruise that lingers. I found a second bag wedged in the drawer, too. But this one was filled with pills and a glossy piece of magazine paper folded tight with care like origami art. Inside was a yellowish-white powder.

I folded the paper right back up.

Next, I crept into her bathroom, a place I hated with its frightening contents like jumbo-sized tampons, hair removal strips, and drip-drying undergarments. Cate's medicine cabinet was lined with orange prescription containers, the way mine used to be. But instead of Valium and Ativan, she had pills with names I didn't recognize. Topamax. Seroquel. Something that was probably her birth control pills, only I couldn't verify this because I hastily put it back after seeing the words
menstrual cycle
written on the label. The rest I tried jamming into my pockets, but my hands were all slick with sweat and one of the containers slipped from my grasp. It rolled across the floor and under the linen closet.

“Crap,” I muttered. I settled everything else on the floor and lay on my stomach to reach around for it. My shirt sort of pulled up so that my bare skin rubbed against the ceramic tiles, picking up dirt and stray hairs like a lint roller. Finally my fingers closed around the pills. And then something else—an envelope, a large one, was taped to the bottom of the hand-painted armoire.

I pulled them both out and sat up. The envelope was faded, lined with creases and water stains. Then my heart stopped.

It had the words
Amy Nevin
written on the front.

Our mother.
My
mother.

I fumbled with the brass clasp and shook the contents into my lap. There wasn't much. Some papers and a single faded photograph.

I inspected the papers first. The first two were photocopies of birth certificates: Cate's and mine. I'd never seen them. I smoothed them in my lap, running my fingers along my name, my stats:

James Ellis Nevin.

6 lbs., 3 oz.

19.5 inches.

Mother: Amy Catherine Nevin.

Father: Unknown.

Cate's was similar, except she was bigger, more impressive:

Catherine Grace Nevin.

7 lbs., 6 oz.

20 inches.

I looked at the third photocopied document.

It was a copy of our mother's death certificate:

Deceased: Amy Catherine Nevin.

Date of birth: 6/22/1978.

Date of death: 11/5/2002.

Cause of death: blood loss due to accidental discharge of a firearm.

I felt queasy. And hot. All at once. My mother had been
murdered.
That's what I'd always been told, so what was “accidental discharge of a firearm” doing on her death certificate? I plucked up the tiny photograph that had been in the envelope. I held it before my eyes.

A moan escaped my lips. It was a photo of two children. A girl and a boy at a park. The girl looked maybe six or seven, with twin black braids that curled out like adders and a winning smile. She was leaping in the air when the picture was snapped, back arched, hands above her head. The boy standing to her left was lesser in every way—smaller, fairer, paler. He had a blue T-shirt on and no jacket and brown cords so short his calves showed. He was scowling and he looked miserable. Or pissed. Both, really.