Heartstopper (42 page)

Sandy shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Ah, come on.”

“I’m kind of tired.”

“No, you aren’t. You’re just upset because Ian—”

“I’m not upset,” Sandy said impatiently, replaying Ian’s unexpected compliment over and over in her mind, like a favorite song. What did it mean? Did it mean
anything?
“Look, I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood, okay?”

Rita raised her hands into the air in a gesture of surrender. “Okay. Fine. You know where we are if you change your mind.”

“Have a good time.” Sandy watched Rita climb into her car. Around her, people were talking and laughing, car doors were opening and closing, engines were starting.

“Good night,” someone called, and Sandy turned toward the voice. But whomever it belonged to had disappeared, and by the time Sandy turned back toward Rita, her car was already pulling out of the parking lot. Rita honked her horn as she advanced onto the street, and Sandy waved.

“You know where to find us,” Rita called through her open window.

“I know where to find you,” Sandy repeated quietly, her words echoing against the suddenly still night air. “Alone at last,” she said as she walked toward her car. She wasn’t sure when she realized hers wasn’t the only car left in the lot, but she knew instantly whose old black Mercury it was. Hadn’t Victor Drummond told her Mr. Lipsman had already left, that he hadn’t been feeling well? What was his car still doing here? “Gordon?” she called out, slowly approaching the vehicle, her eyes flitting cautiously from side to side. “Gordon?”

There was no answer. In the distance she heard the sounds of tires squealing and students laughing. She hoped that everyone would drive safely and behave sensibly, and she said a silent thank-you to the star-filled sky that Cal Hamilton was behind bars and Torrance’s recent nightmare was over. One less thing to worry about, she thought gratefully.

Someone had probably offered to drive Gordon home, she decided as she reached his car and peeked inside. Which made perfect sense. He couldn’t very well drive himself home if he was feeling sick. Too bad, she thought. He’d worked too hard not to be able to wallow, at least for a short time, in all that admiration and applause. Everyone deserves a good wallow now and again, she thought.

“Sandy?” a voice whispered softly, so softly that Sandy wasn’t sure if the voice was real or imagined until she heard it again. “Sandy?”

Sandy’s head snapped toward the sound. It seemed to be coming from a row of brilliant red hibiscus bushes growing along the far side of the lot. “Who’s there?” Sandy asked, advancing gingerly.

“Help me,” the voice urged, floating toward her on soft ripples of air.

Sandy glanced around the now deserted parking lot. “Damn it,” she muttered under her breath, feeling frightened
and debating whether to turn around and run. This is one of those moments, she was thinking. One of those moments that you see in the movies when the stupid heroine goes snooping where she shouldn’t be snooping, and the entire audience is yelling at her not to go, but she goes anyway, sticking her neck out just far enough for some deranged lunatic in a hockey mask to chop it off with a machete.
Don’t go. Don’t go
, she could hear the invisible audience screaming as she approached the bushes and parted the bloodred blossoms.

“Sandy,” she heard again.

“Mr. Lipsman!” she cried out, discovering the drama teacher lying on his back on the ground.

“Please help me.” He tried extending his hands in her direction, but succeeded only in flailing about ineffectually, and almost slapping her in the face.

“For God’s sake, Gordon. What are you doing there?” Sandy grabbed hold of his hands and tried pulling him to his feet, but his clammy palms repeatedly slipped from hers, and he kept ending up on his back. Eventually he found his footing, only to teeter forward on his toes. His arms shot out at his sides as if he were navigating a tightrope, his body ultimately tumbling into hers. Sandy dug her heels into the pavement as he crashed into her, managing to remain upright from sheer force of will.

“Sorry about that,” Gordon said, trying to straighten his red-and-gold-striped tie.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m not feeling very well.” He grabbed a handful of hibiscus in an effort to steady himself. “I decided to lie down. Then I couldn’t get up.” He belched.

The pungent odor of whiskey immediately filled the air. “You’re drunk!” Sandy tried backing away from the unpleasant smell, but it had already surrounded her.

“You sound just like my mother.”

“Dear God.” Again Sandy looked around the empty lot, praying someone else might have lingered, knowing no one had. “Careful,” she said as Gordon tottered unsteadily toward her, his hand landing like a lion’s paw on her shoulder.

“Did you see
Kate?”
he asked.

It took Sandy several seconds to realize he was referring to the play and not an actual person. “I did. It was wonderful.”

“I thought it was smashing. Simply smashing,” he pronounced in his ersatz British accent. “Didn’t you?”

The only thing smashed here is you, Sandy thought but didn’t say. “Do you think you can manage to stay upright?” she asked instead, eager to remove his hand from her shoulder before his weight brought her to her knees.

“Oh, yes. Of course.” He withdrew his hand. His body waved back and forth like a metronome. “Your daughter was a revelation.”

“Yes. She was wonderful.”

“Not wonderful,” Gordon corrected. “A revelation.”

“A revelation, yes.” Sandy looked helplessly toward the deserted street. “What are we going to do with you, Gordon?” Why did she always get into these messes? Why hadn’t she simply gone with Rita and the others to Chester’s? Why did the drunken drama teacher in the parking lot have to be her responsibility?

“It wasn’t easy,” Gordon was saying. “Those kids are talented, but they’re lazy. They don’t want to work. They just want to be stars. Everybody wants to be a star.”

“How are we going to get you home?”

Gordon looked vaguely startled. At least Sandy thought he looked startled. His eyes were so crossed, she couldn’t be sure. “I have my car,” he said, pointing in its general direction and almost falling over.

“Yeah, right. Like you’re in any condition to drive. Come on.” She took him by the elbow and led him as if he were blind. “I guess I’ll have to give you a lift.”

“Really? That’s awfully kind of you.”

What choice do I have? Sandy wondered as she guided him slowly toward her car, then helped him into the front seat.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not feeling very well,” he said, as if he were confiding a deep, dark secret.

“Please tell me you’re not going to be sick.”

“I certainly hope not. My mother would be furious.” He laughed, a sharp, girlish cackle that spewed invisible droplets of whiskey into the air. “Of course, Mother is dead.” He laughed again.

Oh, God, Sandy thought, climbing behind the wheel and starting the engine. “If you think you’re going to be sick, just try to give me some warning, so I can pull over.”

“My mother used to tell me to take deep breaths.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“She used to tell me wipe my feet and mind my manners.”

“One should always wipe their feet and mind their manners,” Sandy agreed, pulling her white Camry out of the parking lot and trying to remember the best way to Gordon Lipsman’s house.

Turn right at the corner. Then just go straight until you hit Citrus Grove
, she heard Delilah say.

“How are you doing there?” she asked a minute later, watching Gordon’s head loll to one side.

“Taking deep breaths,” he said, although he wasn’t.

Please don’t let him be sick in my car, Sandy thought as she turned right at the corner. They drove without incident until they reached Citrus Grove and she made another right turn. If memory served, she was supposed to continue for about half a mile, then turn left.

“Where are we going?” Gordon asked suddenly, sitting
up abruptly and looking around, although it was too dark to see much of anything.

“I’m taking you home,” Sandy reminded him.

“You could take me to
your
home,” he suggested with a grin that was more annoying than endearing.

“No, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not? Don’t you like me, Sandy?”

Sandy decided the best way to deal with this conversation was not to have it. “Am I going the right way, Gordon?” The last thing she wanted to do—other than exchange flirty banter with a man she found borderline repulsive—was to get lost again. She recalled the last time she and Delilah had been out this way and shuddered at the memory of their gruesome discovery at the side of the road.

“Are you cold?” Gordon asked.

“What? No. I’m fine. Am I going the right way?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t look familiar.”

“Concentrate, Gordon.”

“I
am
concentrating.” He trained his deeply crossed eyes on her right profile. “You’re a very beautiful woman, you know that?”

“I turn left, right?”

“Left. Right. What?”

“Oh, God. Gordon, you have to pay attention. I’m supposed to turn left now. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Although it’s faster if you turn right.”

“What?”

“It’s a shortcut.”

“It is? You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

Sandy marveled that he’d actually managed to sound insulted. “Okay. So you’ll be able to direct me?”

“Yes, dear,” he said with that stupid grin. “It’s what I do. I direct.” For the third time that night, he laughed his high-pitched cackle. “Actually, I was thinking of directing
Rent
next year. What do you think?”

“Sounds very ambitious,” Sandy said distractedly. She was trying to focus all her concentration on the unfamiliar road ahead.

“Nothing wrong with a little ambition.” Gordon’s voice was ice-cold.

“No, of course not.” Where were they going? She should have stuck to the route she remembered. What would happen if he’d taken her in the wrong direction, if they ended up driving around in circles half the night? Why had she volunteered to drive him home in the first place? Why hadn’t she suggested he simply sleep it off in his car until morning? Why weren’t there any taxis in Torrance? Why weren’t there more lights along this stretch of road? What would happen if her car were to break down, her tire go flat? Why didn’t she have a cell phone so that she could call for help in case of an emergency? What was the matter with her?

“Did you see it?”

“See what?” Had she missed the turnoff onto Admiral Road?

“Rent.”

“Oh. Yes, yes, I did.”

“On Broadway?”

“Yes.”

“With the original cast?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“I have the original-cast album.”

“That’s good.”

“Not exactly the same thing as actually seeing the play.”

“I guess not.”

“I
wanted
to see it,” Gordon said mournfully. “But my
mother refused to travel all that way to see a bastardized version of
La Bohème.
That’s what she called it. A
bastardized
version.” He shook his head. “Oh, dear. Probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“Take deep breaths,” Sandy reminded him.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Do I just keep going straight?”

“The straight and narrow.”

“Gordon …”

“Besides, we couldn’t leave the cats.”

“What?”

“It was hard to go away and leave the cats.”

“You could have gone without her,” Sandy ventured, then immediately wished she hadn’t. Did she really want to be having this conversation?

“Oh, no. I could never have done that.”

“You were a good son.”

“Well, what could I do? She had no one else to look after her.”

“No other family?” Sandy remembered the photographs she’d seen in Gordon’s house, the two pretty, young girls luxuriating in each other’s company.

“She had a sister, but she died a long time ago. Car accident. How fast are you going, by the way?”

Sandy realized she was speeding and quickly brought the car back to below the thirty-mile-an-hour limit. “What about you?” she asked him. “No siblings?”

“No. I’m an only child. One of a kind,” he said with another of his creepy little half-smiles.

“That you are.”

“And you?”

“I have a brother in California.”

“Is he in the movie business?”

Sandy laughed in spite of herself. “No. He works for some big dot-com organization.”

“Really? And yet he has a sister who doesn’t even own a cell phone. How curious.”

Sandy felt a vague stirring of unease. “How do you know I don’t have a cell phone?”

“Oh, I know a great deal about you, Mrs. Crosbie.”

“Such as?”

“I know you’re very beautiful.”

Sandy groaned audibly. “How do you know I don’t have a cell phone?”

“I know your husband left you for Delilah’s mother.”

“How do you know I don’t have a cell phone?”

“I know you still haven’t filed for a divorce. Turn right at the next intersection,” he advised, before continuing on in the same breath, “I know you’re lonely.”

“How do you know I don’t have a cell phone?”

He laughed. “I’m sorry. Could you repeat the question?”

“Gordon …”

“Yes, yes, yes. How do I know you don’t have a cell phone?” He paused dramatically. “I believe Delilah mentioned it in passing whilst regaling the cast with the details of how you two stumbled upon Mrs. Hamilton’s body the afternoon I sent her to fetch my sheet music. Which the clumsy girl totally ruined, by the way. Turn right here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Quite sure,” he told her, sounding suddenly very sober and very much in control.

Whilst regaling
, Sandy repeated silently as she turned right and continued down the road. Could he be any more pretentious? And was it possible this road could be even less interesting than the one they’d just turned off? Her eyes strained through the darkness toward the empty field on her right. Not even any orange trees, she was thinking, as an old, abandoned farmhouse popped into view at the far end of the field. She couldn’t recall having seen it before
and would probably have missed spotting it this time had it not been for the circle of bright stars that were gathered like a halo over its collapsing roof. “What’s this place?” she asked, glancing just past Gordon’s head.