Poisonous: A Novel (26 page)

He didn’t answer.

“I want your side of the story,” she said.

“I didn’t kill her. That’s all you need to know.”

“Please, Justin,” Max said, her voice calmer than she felt. “I promise to treat your sister’s memory with respect. I have no intention of mentioning anything that she may or may not have done. Heather was a victim. But in the end so was Ivy. Others might be in danger, and you have a unique insight that I can’t get from anyone else.”

“I’ll think about it.” He hung up.

She took a deep breath. Then another. Max didn’t know why that had been so difficult. She switched her call back to Nick. “Still there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you working tomorrow night?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then I’ll be at your house for a late dinner. I’ll text you when I have a better time.”

“You don’t need to come down here. I said—”

“I have an early meeting Friday morning in Palo Alto. Instead of fighting traffic for hours, I’d prefer to be in bed with you. Unless you have other plans.”

“I’d rather be in bed with you, too. Tomorrow night. And I’ll still come up this weekend.”

“If you can juggle things.”

“Max—”

She held her breath. Was he finally going to tell her what was going on with his wife and son? She sat on the couch, not far from her wineglass.

“Be careful,” he said after a moment. “You’re good at your job, but you stir things up and I worry about you getting hurt.”

“I’ll be fine.” She hung up when she realized she was about to make a snide comment about his ex-wife. She leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes.

Don’t take this relationship so seriously.

That was becoming harder.

*   *   *

Austin couldn’t sleep.

He turned on his Xbox and put on his headphones, but even his favorite game
Destiny
couldn’t distract him.

He’d made a huge mistake and he didn’t know how to fix it.

No one could. No one could help him.

He would just have to see this through. All the way through.

Chapter Twenty-one

THURSDAY

At five in the morning, Travis’s phone vibrated. He groaned. Thinking about everything that could go wrong today, he’d slept like shit last night. His head pounded and he grabbed his phone.

It was a text message from an unlisted number:
Hey, it’s Brian.

Ever since Rick moved, Travis had no one he considered a good friend, but Brian was cool. They’d been on the football team together since they were freshmen, the only two sophomores on varsity.

Run before school?

Over the summer they’d gotten into the habit of running in the mornings a couple times a week because Brian lived nearby, but they hadn’t done it since school started. Brian had a new girlfriend, though he was being low-key about it.

Sure. On the track?

Brian replied:
How ’bout the marsh?

Travis stretched and got up. If they ran the entire perimeter, it was just over three miles. He’d be back in time to shower and meet Bailey.

Usual spot?

Brian agreed, and Travis pulled on his sweatpants, Windbreaker, grabbed his car keys and cell phone, then ran down the stairs.

His mom was making coffee, dressed in her robe and slippers.

“You’re up early,” she said.

“I’m going running with Brian.”

She smiled. “That’s nice.”

He kissed her on the cheek. “If I don’t see you when I get back, I’ll see you tonight.”

“You’ll have to get yourself dinner, sweetheart—I have Open House at the school, so your dad is picking me up after and we’re going out.”

“I’ll see if Brian wants to come over and we’ll get a pizza.”

He left, hopped into his truck, and drove the mile to Industrial Way. At the end of the dead-end street, you could access the marsh trails. It was still dark, though the sun was creeping up.

He was glad Brian had reached out to him. Even after the whole thing with Ivy was over, he’d felt that he’d lost more than just his buddy Rick. This summer he and Brian had hung out again, and that was good.

Brian lived in the mobile home park between the freeway and the marsh, and he didn’t like people coming over. His mom wasn’t around and his dad was a prick. So Travis and he always met at the dead end. The businesses here were mostly auto body repair and construction shops and no one gave them trouble. The area was kind of trashy, but when Travis was younger, he and Rick used to ride dirt bikes on the trails. The best was when it had been raining, and the marsh was really a marsh and not just a dried-out low-lying plot of land. Then in eighth grade, they’d come out with a wildlife biologist who talked about the animals and birds that lived in the marsh. Travis didn’t remember any of that, but he, Rick, and Brian had a blast the following weekend when they came out to the marsh and got drunk for the first time.

It was already after five thirty and Travis didn’t see Brian. The light was getting better, but it was still friggin’ cold, so Travis stretched and jogged toward Brian’s place, expecting to meet him on the path.

He rounded a slight curve that dipped down. Salt grass and pickleweed overran the area, especially now with the drought, and it came almost to Travis’s waist. Some bushes were even taller, so he almost missed the movement as another runner came toward him in the twilight. For a second he assumed it was Brian, but then he realized the guy in the dark hoodie was too short. Travis nodded a greeting as they were about to pass, then hesitated. There was something familiar …

A sharp, burning pain spread through his chest. He was having a heart attack.

Except he heard a loud noise. A gunshot. And saw the gun. And then he recognized the shooter.

Suddenly Travis had answers to all his questions about what happened to Ivy, except for one.

Why?

*   *   *

Max was glad David was quiet driving to the Fairstein house. She hadn’t had enough sleep or enough coffee and was, frankly, in a crabby mood. And she shouldn’t be. They’d made progress on the Ivy Lake case in less than three days, had the support of local law enforcement (to a degree) and already had more information than the police had started with. Narrowing down Ivy’s time of death was huge. Max knew that even though Grace didn’t make a big deal about it yesterday, she had been very interested in the information.

David pulled up to the Fairsteins’ house and cut off the engine. “I’ll wait here,” he said.

“Fine,” she snapped, then hesitated before getting out of the car. “Look, I’m sorry about last night. Not about disagreeing with you, but about arguing. I might not understand, but I care about you. I know the situation with Brittney and Emma is tough.”

“You want to fix something that you can’t fix,” David said.

“I just want everyone to listen to me and do what I say because I’m usually right.”

He almost smiled. “I’m okay, Max.”

“Good. I’m going to take the car tonight and visit Nick, then tomorrow morning I have a meeting with Justin Brock.”

“He agreed?”

“He’s thinking about it, but I’m not giving him the chance to say no. I pushed last night, and I won.”

“You usually do.”

“I wish that were true.”

She walked up to the house and knocked. A full minute later, Pilar Fairstein answered the door. Already dressed and ready for the day, she didn’t look happy that Max was there but still let her in.

“I made some coffee,” she said, “but Bailey doesn’t have much time. She leaves for school at seven thirty. She was up early to get ready. In fact, I heard her before dawn. Bringing up this whole affair is troubling for her, I don’t think she slept at all.”

Pilar led Max down the hall into the kitchen. Max admired the vast, open space—two ovens, a six-burner stove, a large chopping block adjoining the center island. The view outside was of the swimming pool and a lawn that appeared to roll all the way to the bay.

“I love kitchens,” Max said. “I took cooking classes when I got out of college and had my apartment kitchen remodeled. This is amazing.”

“My grandmother was a wonderful cook; I learned everything from her. It’s one of the few things that relaxes me.”

Bailey Fairstein walked in wearing a Catholic school uniform, no makeup, her long blond hair braided down her back. She was almost as tall as Max, with a fine bone structure and porcelain skin. Her eyes were sad and wary.

“My mother told me you wanted to talk about Ivy—about before she died, what she was like,” Bailey said, preempting Max. “I’m not sure what you want to know.”

Pilar poured Max a cup of coffee and asked how she liked it. After she put it on the counter, she poured another cup, added a liberal amount of milk, and handed it to her daughter. “Bailey, I’m going to let you talk with Ms. Revere alone. But you don’t have to answer any questions that make you uncomfortable, you know that, right?”

“Yes, Mom.” She smiled thinly. “You can stay if you want.”

“If you’d like, but I suspect you won’t couch the truth if I’m not here.”

“I don’t want to upset you, Mom.”

Pilar squeezed her daughter’s hands and left.

Bailey sat down at the counter opposite Max. “My mom cried last night. She doesn’t want me to know, and she doesn’t cry like other people. She’s very quiet about it. But her eyes were red when she woke up. I hate upsetting her. She worries about me, and she misses my dad.”

“I appreciate you talking to me. I know you have to go to school, so I’ll get right to the point. I work on cold cases. My cases are different than traditional investigations because much of what I do the police can’t—because of time or rules or money. I’m trying hard to understand who Ivy was and who might have wanted to hurt her. I read the Brock lawsuit, though I didn’t know at the time that you were the unnamed witness. Your mother told me yesterday.”

Bailey nodded. “She told me about your conversation. She didn’t want me talking to you—she thinks that it’ll make me sad or depressed, because I was really torn up after Heather killed herself. But I have nothing to hide. I regret everything I did, and I wish I’d stopped Ivy. I wish I’d known how to stop her.”

“It took courage to admit your part in Ivy’s plans,” Max said.

“I didn’t see it at the time … but Ivy was mean. Like, deep-down mean.”

“I want to understand her. Maybe then I can figure out what was going on in her life the week she died.”

“
I
don’t even understand her.” Bailey paused, then added, “We’d been best friends for a long time, ever since she moved to Corte Madera. Ivy wasn’t always that way … she could also be nice and fun. She had a rough time when she first moved here—her parents getting a divorce, her mother remarrying, leaving her friends in Seattle, all that stuff. We were in the same class and played soccer together and became friends. She used to
actually
listen to me. It really wasn’t until eighth grade that she changed.”

“What happened then?”

Bailey looked down at her entwined hands, her long delicate fingers twisting around each other until the knuckles were white. “It’s going to sound really stupid.”

“It doesn’t matter how it sounds. If you think that it was important to Ivy, I want to know.”

“Ivy moved here in the middle of fourth grade. She was real quiet. She didn’t like her new family or stepdad and was mad at her mom for making them leave Seattle. But she was mostly scared.”

“About?”

“I don’t know—looking back, I think it was coming to a new school in the middle of the year. Not having friends. This is a small town, really. We all know one another. But I started school in the middle of the year, back in first grade, so I kind of remembered how it felt. So I was nice to her, and she was nice back. We became inseparable.”

She looked back down at her hands before talking. “There was another girl we hung out with, Rachel Beyers. The three of us—we did everything together. But when there’s three, it doesn’t always work out. Like there’d be a fight, and one of us would take sides, and then we’d say and do mean things, then a day later make up. It seems so silly now, and I don’t remember most of what we argued about. Stupid things, probably. Then everything would be good … until the next disagreement.

“In eighth grade, Ivy and Rachel had a huge fight. Rachel accused Ivy of cheating in a game—some dumb online game—and Ivy said she didn’t. Rachel didn’t believe her. They didn’t talk, and then Rachel started hanging out with a group who didn’t like Ivy for whatever reason. You know how girls are—cliquey. Rachel is the type of girl who is always popular no matter what. I think more things happened between her and Ivy because Rachel completely shunned her, and then everyone else shunned her, too. Near the end of eighth grade, Rachel spread a rumor that Ivy liked this guy, Rick Colangelo.”

“That name is familiar.” Max had seen it somewhere.

“He was Travis Whitman’s best friend until Rick moved—and that was Ivy’s fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, Ivy had a crush on him, it was true, but when you’re thirteen you don’t want anyone to know. Rachel let it out, then told Ivy that Rick wanted to go to the graduation dance with her. So Ivy asked him—and he said he was already going with Heather.”

“Heather Brock.”

“Rachel had already known, but she’d wanted to humiliate Ivy for whatever it was that Ivy had done to her. And it worked. After that, Ivy changed. Her image meant everything to her.”

Just like her mother.

“What happened to Rachel?” Max asked.

“She went to Branson, a private college prep school. She plays volleyball and softball and has probably never thought twice about Ivy—or me—since she left. So that left Heather. Ivy hated her so much, even though none of it was Heather’s fault. By the time Ivy posted that awful video, I don’t think she even remembered why she hated Heather.”

“It seems that a lot of people were angry and upset with Ivy and what she posted on the Internet—their secrets, photos. Embarrassing them like Rachel did to her.”

“Not really.”