Reconstructing Amelia (35 page)

Kate

NOVEMBER 30

“I’m sorry,” Kate said again. She and Lew were standing on Eighth Street, on the meticulous stretch of sidewalk outside the Carmon house. “I just had to go. I know it’s not a good excuse, but I had to see who Ben was.”

“Hmm,” Lew said. He wasn’t looking at her. He hadn’t since she’d told him about going to Ben’s address and discovering Jeremy. “So you’ve said.”

“In the end it was a good thing, right?” Kate tried. But it was hard to focus on her excuses, much less to sound convincing when she still felt so shaken and guilty, for so many different things. “At least now we know that Ben wasn’t involved.”

“Hmm,” Lew said again, looking utterly unmoved. Kate was glad she’d emphasized how upset she’d been to learn that Jeremy was Amelia’s father. She suspected that was the only reason Lew wasn’t coming down harder on her. “We got the phone company to expedite a response to our subpoena.” He checked his small notepad. “The texts to you about Amelia’s dad came from a phone registered to Daniel Moore.”

“Oh God,” Kate said quietly.

If Daniel had been angry enough to tip off
insidethelaw
—an act that could easily be traced back to him—sending some anonymous texts to Kate would have been nothing. Still, thinking of his writing such vicious things was chilling. It was far beyond trying to publicly humiliate Jeremy. It was threatening.

“Why would he write that Amelia didn’t jump, though?”

“He didn’t. Those first two texts to you about Amelia came from elsewhere. I’m waiting for a call on that. But the texts to Amelia about her dad”—Lew nodded in the direction of the house—“those all came from here.”

“Zadie Goodwin sent them?”

“I expect so,” he said, looking up at the building. “But all we know for sure is that they were routed through a computer in this house. More than one person lives here.” He turned back to Kate, looking directly at her for the first time. “There is something else you should know,” Lew said. “The tech guys uncovered some more text messages on Amelia’s phone. Deleted ones. They make those little paper notes look like, well, child’s play.”

“What did they say?” Kate spun around. “I want to see them.”

Lew shook his head. “They aren’t the kind of thing any parent should ever see.”

They rang the bell and waited. Kate squinted up at the converted factory’s polished glass and steel facade. The sun was high in the sky now, glinting off the building’s huge windows.

“We’re sure this is one house?” Lew asked.

“I think so,” Kate said, but it was conspicuously large, even compared to Park Slope’s largest brownstones. “There’s only one bell.”

Lew had to ring it three more times before someone cracked the door and pressed her eyeball to it. Through the sliver, Kate spied a small woman with a bent, wary affect.

Lew ducked his head down to make eye contact with her. “We’re here to see Zadie Goodwin and her parents.”

“One moment. I will check,” the woman said in her thick European accent. Her one eye narrowed, then she slammed shut the door.

A beat later, it opened again. Standing there was a towering guy in a flashy gray suit and a pink, French-cuffed shirt. His shiny silver cuff links were shaped like dice, and on his right hand was a ring with a gaudy red jewel in the center. He was handsome, in an overcoiffed, overtanned way that screamed substantial wealth without concomitant sophistication. Even his teeth were too perfect and too white, like someone overcompensating for a history of bad dental hygiene.

“Hi there,” he said with a smile that shimmied between friendly and fuck you. “I’m Frank Carmon, and you would be?”

“I’m Lieutenant Thompson, and this is Kate Baron,” Lew began. “We’d like to ask your daughter a few questions about Amelia Baron. She died in a fall from the roof of Grace Hall. She was Kate’s daughter.”

Carmon frowned and shook his head. “That was a goddamn shame. I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” he said to Kate, then turned back to Lew. “What is it you need to talk to my Zadie about?”

My Zadie
. Like she was a toddler or a little porcelain doll. It was disturbing.

“The girls were in some kind of club together,” Lew said casually. “We’re just trying to gather information about Amelia’s state of mind from every possible source.”

Carmon stared out over their heads as he ran his tongue over his teeth. Finally, he looked over his shoulder toward the woman who’d answered the door, now looming in the shadows behind him.

“Go get Zadie,” he said. “Tell her it’s important.”

He opened the door then, leading the way into the vast, open living-room-cum-dining-area-cum-kitchen, flushed with sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Carmon picked up a short glass from the otherwise bare granite countertop.

“Can I get either of you a drink?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” Lew said. “You used to be at the Seventy-eighth, right? Here in the neighborhood?”

Carmon laughed, brushing invisible lint from his pants.

“Yeah, for about five minutes a million years ago,” he said. “Before I decided that there were easier ways to make a living than getting shot at.”

“Looks like you were right.” Lew motioned to the house. “Don’t know about easier, but it sure looks like it pays better.”

“So far, so good.” Carmon winked, took a sip.

“You get a lot of your guys from the Seventy-eighth?”

Carmon stared hard at Lew for a minute, then smiled.

“Some.”

“Including Detective Molina?”

“Been a long time since I got involved in specific hires,” Carmon said smoothly. “I’ve got people who do that for me these days.”

“Molina was the detective assigned to Amelia Baron’s case. Looks like he—at a minimum—cut some corners to rule it a suicide. Then a couple of days later, he left to work for you,” Lew said, opting for the full-on, direct approach. “Seems like a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think? Given that your stepdaughter and Amelia seemed to be butting heads quite a bit in this club of theirs.”

Carmon nodded like he was considering this information. “I can’t speak to any of that. I don’t get involved in the details of my stepdaughter’s high-school drama,” he said. “But if you want to talk to Molina, Lieutenant, I’m sure I could get him on the phone. Right now, if you want. That is, assuming he does work for me.”

Zadie stomped into the living room then, not stopping until she threw herself onto a stool at the kitchen island.

“I was doing my homework,
you know
,” she growled. She was wearing a plaid schoolgirl skirt that wasn’t much wider than a belt and had a bunch of piercings in her ears and a ring through her nose. It fit nicely with her heavy black eye makeup and short, shaggy black hair, which had a huge chunk of white down one side, like the off-kilter stripe on a skunk. Kate couldn’t take her eyes off the stripe. “Just because your friend says they’ll probably let me
in
, doesn’t mean that Columbia definitely will. I’m not in until I’m actually in.”

“Columbia,” Lew said. “Impressive. Getting in there sure wouldn’t be a thing you’d want to jeopardize.”

“Tell me about it.” Carmon shook his head in exaggerated disbelief. “Lucky for her, she doesn’t have my genes. Come on, my Zadie.” He waved her over, then patted the spot on the couch next to him. “These nice folks just need to ask you a couple questions about that girl from your school, the one who died.”

Zadie rolled her eyes again, then pounded over and dropped down next to Carmon with a big huff.

“One thing here, before my Zadie answers any of your questions,” Carmon said, feigning nonchalance. “She doesn’t need a lawyer, does she? This is just informational?”

“She’s not under arrest,” Lew said, notably skirting the question, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

He wasn’t making any promises, and it wasn’t lost on Carmon. He stared hard at Lew for a long time.

“She didn’t have anything to do with what happened to that girl,” Carmon said. “So you can ask whatever you want about that. But we’re ending this if we get near anything that could keep her tail out of Columbia. She’s worked too hard, and I’ve spent too much goddamn money—”

The front door opened then. There were voices in the hallway—one sharp and rapid-fire, the other mumbled and apologetic, probably the housekeeper. Then there was the sound of high heels clicking loudly across the concrete floor.

“Oh,” Adele said, her pretty face falling as she rounded the corner. She recovered gracefully, though, smiling easily as she headed straight over to Kate, in her fashionable black A-line dress and big hoop earrings, her hair swept up in a soft but flawless chignon. Adele leaned forward, pressing her cheek hard against Kate’s as she kissed the empty air next to her ear. “What a nice surprise, Kate. But you didn’t have to come all the way over just to talk about PTA matters. I know how busy you are.”

“We’re not here about that,” Kate said, bracing for Lew to make her stop talking. He didn’t. “We’re here about what happened between Amelia and the Magpies.”

“The Magpies?” Adele pursued her red lips and looked over at Carmon, who shrugged and took another sip of his drink. “I’m not sure I—”

“I’ve read the minutes of the school board meetings,” Kate said, hoping things might go better if she kept Adele from embarrassing herself by outright lying to them. “I know that Woodhouse tried to get rid of the clubs and that the school board stopped him.”

Adele dropped her purse down hard onto one of the kitchen stools, then turned back slowly. She crossed her arms as she leaned back against the counter.

“Then you also must know that the board was only looking out for the best interests of the school,” Adele said calmly.

Kate tried not to get angry, but it wasn’t working. “The school had an obligation—”

“The school can’t control what students do when they’re not on school grounds,” Adele said coolly. If she felt defensive, she was hiding it masterfully. “That kind of monitoring is a practical and legal impossibility, particularly in the age of the smartphone. The responsibility for policing off-campus and cyber-behavior must be left to individual families.”

The lines were well rehearsed, as though Adele had been waiting for Lew and Kate to come asking. She probably had been, from the very first night she’d shown up at Kate’s door. In fact, that could have been the real reason Adele had come by that first night.

Kate turned to Zadie then, hoping she might be less prepared. “Was it because she was gay? Is that why you did it?”

“Zadie, don’t answer that,” Adele snapped.

“Why? I want to,” Zadie bit right back at her, then swiveled her head in Kate’s direction. “I wasn’t going to let Amelia turn Dylan into some dyke just because that’s what
she
wanted.” Zadie looked like she was trying to stay tough, but her cheeks were flushed and her voice was getting quaky. “Amelia thought that having sex with Dylan made her more important than me. But sex is easy. With Dylan, it’s practically nothing. Trust me, she’ll have sex with anyone not at this school. And I know all this because I’ve been fucking best friends with her for
twelve
years.
That’s
something that matters. Not this . . . whatever . . . she had with Amelia for, like, two weeks.”

But the look in Zadie’s eyes said that it wasn’t that simple. She was trying to hide it—working her neck, the tough curl of her lip—but there was something desperate about it, like Dylan was all she’d ever had.

“Zadie, we need to know what happened up on that roof,” Lew said calmly. “It’s time for the truth, all of it.”

“I’m not going to let Zadie get into a discussion that could incriminate her,” Adele said, holding up a hand as she stepped between Lew and Zadie. “If you’d like to interview her further, it will be at the police station, with our attorney present. But I assure you, whatever happened on that roof was an accident.”

“An accident?” Zadie glared at her mom. “You’re acting like I was there. Like
I
did something.”

“We know for sure that someone in this house did something to Amelia.” Lew pulled from his pocket two printouts and tossed them onto the coffee table. “She got texts harassing her about her relationship with Dylan and about the identity of her father. They came from this house.”

Zadie stepped forward and picked the pages up. “What the hell do I care about her dad?”

If she was pretending not to have seen those messages before, she was doing a very good job.

“We were hoping you’d tell us,” Lew said. “Because we know for sure that the messages came from here, from this house.”

“I didn’t— Holy shit, Mom, what is your deal with this girl?” Zadie’s eyes were wide as she turned them on Adele. “You told me that you’d had some whole thing with her mom in college, that you wanted to make it up to her.” She hooked her thumb toward Kate. “That’s why you wanted me to tap Amelia. But you didn’t even go to college with her, Mom, did you?”

“Zadie!” Adele snatched the pages out of her daughter’s hands. She folded them in half, then visibly tried to regain her composure. It wasn’t as successful this time. “Be quiet, honey, please.”

Kate watched a tremor of hurt pass over Zadie’s face, then rage rise up in her eyes. Why in the world would Adele have asked Zadie to invite Amelia into the Maggies? Kate’s eyes moved from Zadie’s face to the white stripe in her hair, a stripe that could have been many things, including Waardenburg syndrome.

The most exquisite, unusual eyes, too
, Kate now remembered Adele saying when she’d been to the house.
That’s a family trait? Two different colors like that?
Why wouldn’t Adele have asked about Waardenburg syndrome? Why wouldn’t she have mentioned that her daughter had it, too?
I knew people at Slone, Thayer. I still do.
It was too much information for Kate to process all at once.

“So what happened between you and Amelia on the roof was an accident, like your mom said, Zadie?” Lew seemed to be deliberately trying to fan the flames. “The two of you had an argument about Dylan, maybe. It got out of hand?”

“Stop it! Stop talking to her!” Adele screamed at Lew. “I know you don’t have an arrest warrant. You would have shown it to us if you did.”