Turning Angel (21 page)

“Did he say where they got it?”

“Claims they found it in a bag by the lake road.”

“This is Jimmy Wingate?”

“Yeah.”

“Were his parents there?”

Sonny chuckles dryly. “Oh, yeah. Jimmy’s old man threatened to beat the crap out of him if he didn’t tell us the truth, and the kid
still
wouldn’t talk.”

“You think they got the acid from Marko Bakic?”

“Who else? But nobody’s admitting that. These kids either love Marko or they’re scared shitless of him.”

“Maybe both,” I suggest. “Marko knows nothing about American football, but he won the South State football playoff for St. Stephen’s by kicking the winning field goal. I wouldn’t think that would be enough to keep kids quiet when a childhood friend dies, though.”

“Yeah, well, time’s on our side, bubba. Let Chris’s death really sink in, and somebody’ll get mad enough or upset enough to talk.”

“I hope so. St. Stephen’s can’t take much more of this.”

“Natchez can’t take much more,” Sonny mutters.

“Could the LSD have come from Cyrus White rather than Marko?”

“You can bet it went through Cyrus’s hands before it got to Marko. Just like it went through the Asians’ hands before it got to Cyrus. I suppose some other white kid could be buying from Cyrus, but it wasn’t until Marko got to St. Stephen’s that this shit started showing up there.”

“Look, Sonny, I had to mention the Cyrus-Kate connection in front of Sheriff Byrd. I kept your name out of it, but I did tell him the contact was documented. He may be able to figure out where it came from based on that.”

“Ah, shit, don’t worry about it. Byrd can’t afford to fire me. I make him look too good. I gotta go, Penn. Later.”

I hang up and get out of the car. As I walk up the steps, Mia runs forward and hugs me, then sobs against my chest. “What’s happening? Everything’s gone crazy!”

“Calm down,” I tell her, trying to separate us, then giving up and stroking her hair the way I do Annie’s when she’s upset. “It’s going to be all right.”

She pulls away and stares at me, her eyes sparkling with tears. “No, it’s not. You know it’s not. Don’t tell me things are okay when they’re not. My dad does that.”

The dad who left when she was two.
“I’m not saying things are okay, Mia. I’m telling you I’m going to make them right.”

“How? You can’t bring Chris back to life.”

“No. All I can do is try to keep what happened to Chris from happening to anybody else.”

She lays her head on my chest again. I let her alone for a bit, trying not to feel too awkward with her body pressing against mine. Then I separate us.

“Where’s Annie?”

“In bed.”

“Good. Do you feel like telling me what you know now?”

She wipes her eyes and nose. “My eyes are swollen. That always happens when I cry. I know I look like shit.”

“It’s okay. Just tell me what happened.”

She disengages from me, sits on the top step, and hugs her knees. “About seven tonight, Chris bet Jimmy Wingate he could beat him across the lake. Swimming, right? As cold as it is at night, and that’s the wide part of the lake, too. Jimmy didn’t want to do it, but Chris was wasted and kept calling Jimmy a pussy. I can just see it. Chris is such a redneck sometimes. So they tried it. No life jackets, pitch black. They were about halfway across when Chris got into trouble. He just stopped swimming and tried to float. He told Jimmy he was watching the moon, that the moon was changing colors every second.”

They’d done three tabs of acid in the past twelve hours,
Sonny said.

“Jimmy tried to get him to keep swimming,” Mia continues, “but it was like Chris couldn’t hear him. Jimmy was treading water, and he knew he couldn’t last long. When he finally got Chris to start swimming again, Chris started puking. After that, Chris couldn’t keep himself afloat. Jimmy wasn’t sure which bank they were closer to, so he tried to pull Chris back to the pier where they’d started. He barely made it forty yards before he was exhausted.” Mia is rocking steadily now. “He had to let Chris go, and he barely made it back himself. He was crying like a baby when he told me this.”

“Things
have
gone crazy,” I murmur.

“Did I help any?” Mia asks.

“What?”

“About Shad Johnson. Did I help Dr. Elliott by seeing Shad with the judge and the sheriff?”

I reach down and squeeze her shoulder. “You helped a lot. I really appreciate it.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“I wish I could, but—”

“You don’t trust me.”

“It’s not that. It’s just…”

She looks up, her eyes hurt. “If you really trusted me, you’d tell me.”

I sit beside her on the steps. “Drew’s situation is about more than a crime, okay? It’s political. The D.A. wants to convict Drew to prove that a rich white man won’t be treated any better than a poor black one in this town.”

“That sounds like a good thing.”

“If that were the real reason he was doing it, it would be. But it’s not. Shad wants to be elected mayor. And if what he really wanted was to bring this city back to life, I’d support him. But that’s not what he wants. He wants a stepping-stone to bigger things. He wants personal power. And he’s willing to railroad Drew to get it.”

Mia turns to me and smiles through her tears. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No.”

She raises a forefinger and pretends to zip her lips. “It’s in the vault.”

“
Seinfeld
?”

She laughs. Then she begins to cry again.

“Did you know Chris well?” I ask.

“Since nursery school.”

This doesn’t surprise me. I started at St. Stephen’s when I was four years old. Fourteen years later, most of the people I graduated with were children I’d played with in nursery school. I knew them as well as I knew my own family, and many of them I still do. That’s one of the things that makes this shrinking town worth saving. Some of the best parts of American life that have vanished elsewhere still thrive here.

“I still want to help,” Mia says. “I mean it. Even if you think it’s dangerous. School’s boring me to death. I’m just counting the days until graduation. I want to do something that matters. Especially now.”

I stand and pull her to her feet, then look hard into her eyes. “Who brought the LSD to the party?”

She goes still, her eyes locked on mine.

“Was it Marko?”

“I don’t know. Not for sure.”

“Would you tell me if you knew?”

“I don’t know.”

“What would keep you from it? Loyalty to your friends? To Marko? Or is it fear of Marko?”

She closes her eyes, then opens them again. “I’ll think about that, okay? I’m not sure myself.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’d better go now.”

I try to give her a smile of encouragement, but it fails.

“Will you hug me once more?” she asks in a small voice.

I start to, but something stops me.

“Never mind,” she says, her mercurial eyes quick to recognize my hesitation. She walks down the steps and to her car, not once looking back.

“Be careful, Mia.”

“Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.” She slams her door and pulls away, leaving me feeling like a complete asshole.

Chapter
15

Closeted in my downstairs bedroom with Kate’s shoe box, I remove her journal again and prop myself up in bed. I already tried without success to view the contents of the three Lexar flash drives from the box. Each flash drive is protected by a security program that requires a password even to view file names and types. I’ll have to ask Drew tomorrow if he knows any of Kate’s passwords. If Kate stored intimate photos on the drives, maybe he was privy to that information, so that he could borrow the drives sometimes and view them. If not, I’ll have to hire a professional hacker to open the files.

After adjusting my reading light, I reread the opening passage of Kate’s journal, then wade into the body of the work. Her voice seems mature for her age, which I would expect from a senior bound for Harvard. But there’s something else here, an unguarded honesty I didn’t expect. I’ve been sent many manuscripts by published and unpublished writers over the years, and one thing I’ve learned is that people who write unflinchingly from the heart have the capacity to move us, where more polished craftsmen often fall short.

Kate’s journal begins in the early summer of last year. As I read the early entries, my hunger to know more about her more recent months causes me to skip ahead. What quickly emerges from the pages is a picture of a girl maturing very fast, changing from a bored overachiever concerned with the social politics of high school to a fully engaged young woman ready to ditch the standard plan in order to be with the man she loved. By the time I’ve skimmed to the halfway point, I find myself mourning Kate Townsend more deeply than I would have thought possible.

Realizing that I might have missed important information in my haste, I go back and start again, this time folding down the corners of pages that seem representative of the arc of her final year, and also of those that hold information that might be helpful in defending Drew.

There’s the early stuff, where Kate was still a part of the high school as most adults imagine it. Drew was recuperating from a knee injury, and thus home all day with Kate and Timmy.

6/3

Mia got voted head cheerleader today. Makes me wish I never even tried out. Well, she deserves it. She actually seems to give a damn about the stupid games, or at least about cheering. I’m not sure why I tried out except that it’s what you’re supposed to do. I’m such a retard. It’s too late to quit now though. Damn, damn, damn.

6/18

Steve and I went to the lake today. He was really moody. He keeps asking me what I’ll do if I get into Harvard or Princeton. As if I would turn one of them down! It’s so obvious that we’re going to split up when that time comes. I don’t know how I can keep playing this role until then. I already can’t remember what made me date him in the first place. I mean the physical element is still there, but aside from that, it’s hell. He can’t carry on a conversation that’s not about baseball or deer hunting or what so-and-so looks like. And he’s so VAIN. I don’t think he’s ever passed a mirror without looking into it. He’s always fixing his hair and asking me how it looks. He’s such a
girl
. Nobody would believe it, but he is. God, I want a guy I can talk to. I hope like hell the guys at college are different. The ones at colleges around here sure aren’t, though; they’re the Steves that left high school two or three years ago.
Please
let me get in early decision.

6/29

Played tennis with Ellen Elliott after work today (6–2, 6–1). She was
so
pissed. I wonder if they still make love. I really doubt it. Mom told me she heard that Ellen cheated on him a couple of years ago. Why would she do that? She’s got a guy most women would give their left ovary for and she’s cheating with some stupid tennis pro? Is there something I don’t know about Drew? Is he terrible in bed? Brilliant and interesting but incompetent between the sheets? No way. That can’t be it. They sleep in different rooms now. He says it’s because of his knee, but I’ll bet that dates back to the tennis pro. I bet I know why she did it, too. I’ve seen the insecurity in her, that need for constant reassurance. Like the breast implants.
Way
too big. Don’t ever let me be that pathetic.

7/1

Drew talks to me like an equal. None of the condescending crap I get from most adults around here. That drives me
bat-shit
. Most of them haven’t read a book in twenty years other than John Grisham or Nora fucking Roberts. The other day I made an allusion to John Updike and Mrs. Andersen thought I was talking about an
actor.
Hello?!!! Sometimes when his knee is really hurting, Drew asks me to read to him. I love it! He lies there on the sofa just looking at the ceiling. He lets me pick what I want to read, too. I read him a play by Paddy Chayefsky, one of Kesey’s books. Part of
Goat.
An essay by Ayn Rand. He asks me where I come up with this stuff. Nabokov would be too obvious, but once I tried to embarrass him by reading an incestuous sex scene from Anaïs Nin. He kept a straight face for about five minutes, then closed his eyes. When I got to the really explicit part, he started to snore. I really thought he’d fallen asleep! Bastard!

7/28

Ellen won’t look me in the eye when we’re in their house. On the tennis court we’re fine, but if she comes home while I’m keeping Tim, she won’t meet my gaze. It’s weird. It’s like she sees me as a threat. I go out of my way to speak to her, but she cuts every conversation short. Has she caught Drew looking at me when I’m not looking or something? Has he
talked
about me to her? Maybe she feels I’m usurping her position with Timmy. If it weren’t for Drew, I’d want out of there.

8/9

Drew’s knee has gotten a lot better. He’s talking about going on the mission trip to Honduras after all. Ellen told me I should go along, that it’s the kind of real-world experience that a lot of the kids going into the Ivy League may already have had. I mean,
what?
When I asked why
she
doesn’t go, she told me once was enough. She apparently got a case of dysentery in the Dominican Republic, and that killed her desire to help “the unfortunate” in any way except by writing a check. If he’s serious about letting me come, I’m going to do it! Why not? I’d love to see Honduras, and I’d really love to be with him somewhere without Ellen and Timmy. Just to see how we are.

On August 18, Drew and Kate flew to Honduras along with a team sponsored by a local church.