Reconstructing Amelia (19 page)

“And who gets to keep the money if I get in?”

“You can take the money and flush it down the toilet for all I care. I just want to be able to tell that stuck-up piece of shit to go fuck himself, excuse my French.”

“Behold, ladies,” Zadie said with a dramatic wave of her hand. “A dad who places bets on whether you’re going to get into college. This is what you get when your mom marries a guy from the wrong side of Brooklyn.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” her stepdad said, as he tossed some of the newly fluffed pillows to the floor so he could sit down on the couch, then rested his feet up on the pricey-looking coffee table. “You get a boatload of free cash
and
a kick-ass good time.”

Kate

NOVEMBER 27

Kate and Lew were sitting on her couch in front of the two now-open boxes, which a messenger had delivered shortly after they’d gotten back from Sylvia’s. Each was packed with pages and pages of documents. Duncan had rubber-banded them together—each a couple of inches or more high—and labeled them:
E-MAIL, TEXTS, WORD DOCS
.

“There’s so much,” Kate whispered, as Lew pulled out the note Duncan had sent along with them.

“Sounds like there’s more, too, he’s got some passwords listed here—Facebook, Twitter,” Lew said. “Looks like there was a blog she was posting to also. We’ll have to take a look at that. Hard to say yet what the primary mode of communication is for these kids. Gchat, Facebook, texting—it’s different in every school, you know.”

At sixty-odd years old, Lew sounded much better versed in teenage modes of communication than Kate. She barely understood the point of Twitter, much less had any idea how to follow anyone.

“So you’ve dealt with this kind of electronic history on cases before?”

“On cases, no.” Lew smiled and shook his head. “But I’ve got six grandkids. They manage to get me on Facebook more than once a day, sending me pictures and messages and all sorts of stuff.”

“Six grandkids?” Kate repeated quietly, trying not to let herself think of all the grandchildren she’d never have.

“And only half of our kids have started their own families, God help me once they all get going,” he said, trying to sound annoyed, even though he obviously wasn’t. He motioned to the boxes. “I think we should divide and conquer here.”

“Can you look at her Facebook and Twitter accounts and that blog?” Kate asked. “There’s a desktop computer on the second floor, in my office.”

Lew nodded in the direction of the stacks of pages. “You’ll be okay down here with all that?”

“No,” Kate said, taking a deep breath, “probably not.”

Once Lew had disappeared up the steps, Kate pulled out the first stack of papers, Amelia’s Word documents. They seemed the least likely to plummet her into hysterics, though she knew that the real dirt and, thus, anything useful, would likely be in Amelia’s texts. But she wasn’t yet ready to dive headlong into those. Luckily, aside from the
gRaCeFULLY
posts that Kate had already seen, the Word documents were all school papers or stories that Amelia had written. Kate was almost done flipping through what was left of the stack when she came to a paper titled
To the Lighthouse: Friendship and Feminism
, by Amelia Baron. It was the paper Amelia had supposedly plagiarized. Except the title didn’t sound the same as the one that had fallen out of Amelia’s notebook.

Kate took the paper downstairs to the kitchen, to the drawer where she’d dumped all those mean little notes when Adele had shown up at her door. She’d slid Amelia’s paper into that same drawer. She tugged it out now and looked at the title page:
Representations of Time: To The Lighthouse
, by Amelia Baron. Not the same, not even close.

Kate turned to the kitchen table, setting the papers out side by side. She flipped through the pages, skimming. The papers had nothing in common as far as she could see. Why would Amelia have two different papers on the exact same book? Kate stared down at them, tracing her fingers over the titles. It was proof Amelia didn’t cheat. Kate felt sure of it, even if she couldn’t explain how.

Kate left the papers on the table and headed back up to the living room, where the seemingly endless stacks of documents remained. She pulled the e-mails out first; a Post-it on top read: “Only printed out last 4 months. You want more let me know.” All those messages in four months.

The first e-mail was from George McDonnell. Y
OU GOING TO
C
HLOE’S PARTY THIS WEEKEND
? H
EARD SOMEBODY’S BRINGING
E. E? As in ecstasy? Was George McDonnell the mystery boy whom Amelia had gone into the house with? Kate was still trying to accept the whole sex thing, and now there were drugs involved, too?

Kate ripped the stack of e-mails apart, praying Duncan would have thought to include Amelia’s outgoing messages. Sure enough, about three quarters of the way through there was a flag and a note: “Sent File.” Kate raced through Amelia’s messages until she laid her hands on her daughter’s reply.

E? W
HAT ARE YOU LIKE A DRUG ADDICT ALL OF A SUDDEN OR SOMETHING
? Amelia had written. N
OT COOL, BRO
. A
NYWAY
, I
CAN’T GO
, I’
VE GOT AN EARLY PRACTICE
S
UNDAY A.M.

Kate closed her eyes and clutched the e-mail to her chest. Thank God. Maybe she was right about some things after all. Kate looked at Amelia’s next sent e-mail, and it was to her lacrosse coach, Ms. Bing. I
S THE TRAINING CAMP GOING TO BE OVER SPRING BREAK AGAIN THIS YEAR
?

Maybe it wasn’t all lies and bad surprises. But then, about a dozen pages in, Kate got to an e-mail that stopped her cold.

I’m sorry, Amelia. I was out of line. Can we talk about it? Please.

      —Phillip

Whoever this Phillip was, something had happened between Amelia and him. Some kind of fight. Kate looked up at the e-mail address: [email protected].

Phillip Woodhouse, the headmaster of Grace Hall? Kate blinked at the e-mail, then looked again at the address. What was Phillip Woodhouse doing e-mailing Amelia with that kind of tone:
I’m sorry
?
I was out of line
? When did a headmaster ever apologize to a student? And what kind of line, exactly, had he drifted across?

Kate startled when she heard Lew on the stairs. When she turned up, he was ashen.

“What’s wrong?” Kate asked. First the e-mail from Woodhouse and now that awful look on Lew’s face: it was too much. The adrenaline was making her hands shake. “What did you find?”

She waited for Lew’s expression to lift, but instead he just paused some distance away and gripped the back of the armchair.

“I think you should come up and see for yourself,” he said finally.

“What—no. Why? Upstairs?” Kate felt queasy as she looked toward the steps. “Just tell me what you found. Something on her Facebook account?”

He shook his head. “Like I said, you need to see it.”

Kate felt light-headed as she looked back down at the e-mails on her lap.

“But I found another paper,” she said finally, trying to buy herself time. “Two different papers for the same assignment. The one they said Amelia cheated on.”

“Huh,” Lew said, not sounding very interested. “That bears looking into.”

“And I found this.” She stood up and held out the e-mail to him.

He glanced down at it.

“Who’s Phillip Woodhouse?” he asked. “We think he could be our mystery boyfriend?”

“He’s the headmaster at Grace Hall.”

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. T
HINK ABOUT YOUR FUTURE
, A
MELIA
. T
HIS COULD COST YOU
.

Amelia had responded, by e-mail, only two times, with almost as few words: O
KAY
and W
HAT 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?