What Has Become of You (34 page)

“Nice day out today, isn’t it?” the attorney said to Ferreira, as though offering him an olive branch. “Seems like spring is really here.”

“Honey of a day,” the detective agreed.

Were they really talking about the weather? And were they really doing so in front of a young man who had been in lockup for three days? Embarrassed for them, Vera lowered her face and sipped the dreadful coffee. She was trying her hardest not to stare at Frank Ouelette, who was seated directly across from her.

Presently Ferreira said, “I think we can get started here. I need to be back at the station in half an hour, give or take. You ready to say your piece, Frank?”

“I am,” the boy said.

“And Miss Lundy is just hear to listen,” Ferreira said. “Right, Miss Lundy?”

“Right,” she said in a whisper, then wetted her dry lips with the tip of her tongue.

Locking eyes with Vera as though he and she were the only two people in the room, the boy began to speak.

“The first thing I wanted to tell you is that I didn’t kill your student. I mean, not Jensen. I guess Sufia was your student, too, but that wasn’t my fault—not completely. It was all Jensen Willard’s idea, just like Angela before that.

“Jensen was starting to get curious about what it would be like to kill someone. For weeks before the thing with Angela happened, Jensen kept saying: ‘In order to be a writer, you have to experience
everything
. How can we know what it’s like to kill somebody unless we actually do it? Maybe it’d be easy. Maybe no one would ever even connect it to us. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out?’ But I was sure that was just talk, like all the other stupid talks we had. And besides, I don’t even want to be a writer. I hate writing. That was pure, one-hundred-percent Jensen—not me.

“My car was broke down at the time, so I was borrowing my brother Ritchie’s shitbox Ford—sorry, I don’t mean to cuss—and one night we were riding around with nothing to do and saw Angela Galvez along the bike path. I didn’t know who she was, but Jensen said, ‘There’s that brat whose mother is talking crap about me around town. We should take her and mess with her, just to teach her a lesson.’

“So we stopped and got out and talked to her for a while. I remember Angela saying to Jensen, ‘Your bra is still in our tree!’ She was a funny kid. Cute. I didn’t want to do anything to her, or even get her into Ritchie’s car, but Jensen told her to get in and we would get her an ice cream over at the Dairy Queen. The kid got right into the front seat next to me. Jensen took a seat in the back, right behind her.

“This Angela kid was pretty smart, because she figured out right away that we were driving in the wrong direction to go to Dairy Queen. I wasn’t sure where I was driving, but I was trying to get to someplace off the main roads. And after a few minutes she started whining, like, and saying, ‘I want to get out now. My mom is expecting me. I want to go home. I don’t feel like getting ice cream anymore.’”

The lawyer, who had been keeping a hand on Frank Ouelette’s shoulder as though to restrain him from his own torrent of words, interjected then: “You don’t have to go into all this, Frank. It’s already on the record.”

“But I want to explain it to her,” the boy said, jerking his chin toward Vera. “I want to explain because I know what she must be thinking. I want to do what’s
right
.”

Vera could hear herself in the boy—could hear her own desire, however poorly executed and belated, to do what was right also. This was a similarity she did not want. As for what she was thinking, she had no idea how Frank Ouelette could be so sure what was on her mind; she was too horrified to formulate any thought other than the vague, sinking idea that everything the boy had said so far smacked of the truth.

“Angela was saying stuff, but Jensen wasn’t having any of it. She said, ‘We’re not getting ice cream, you little bitch. You’re going to get a lesson that’s a long time coming, and you’d better stop whining about it.’ That just set Angela off even more. She was trying to get the passenger door open. She was pounding on the window and screaming, and I thought she was going to break the window, and I got nervous, and I yelled something, and the next thing I knew Jensen had reached around from the back seat and had both hands wrapped real tight around this kid’s nose and mouth. Angela tried to bite her, I think, because then
Jensen
screamed and she was screaming at
me
to do something, and at this point the kid was thrashing around like a fish on the end of the line, and I was freaked out by the screaming, afraid someone would hear it, so I pulled over on the side of the road and put my hands around her neck, and these weird noises were coming out of the kid, kind of like she’d got a dog’s squeak toy stuck in her throat, and then she went quiet and the passenger side of the seat underneath her was all wet. She’d, uh . . . she’d emptied her bladder.”

Frank Ouelette Jr. did sound, now, as though he were going to cry. He took a few big swallows and a few extra seconds to compose himself again before he continued.

“So you see, it really wasn’t planned. I think
Jensen
might have planned it, but I sure didn’t. I’d never even seen a dead person before except for the pictures I sometimes looked at on these gore sites where you can, you know, look at photos of people with their heads blown off and stuff. But this was nothing like looking at a photo. It was more real. And we couldn’t just keep this girl in the front seat, with . . . the way she was.

“We ended up driving the shi—the Ford into the woods, and we got a tarp out of Ritchie’s trunk and wrapped Angela in it real fast before stuffing her into the trunk. I think we were both in shock by then, and even Jensen was crying a little now, saying, ‘It’s ugly, it’s ugly,’ and I didn’t know if she was talking about the body or about what we had just done. We just sat in the woods for a while, a few feet away from the Ford, because neither of us knew what to do next or where to take the body. When it got darker, Jensen said, ‘We should put her behind the Laundromat because that’s where all the crack dealers go. They’ll think one of them did it.’ So that’s why we left her where we did.”

Vera hadn’t known that Angela had been wrapped in a tarp. That detail had been omitted from the news reports. She thought of Sufia Ahmed, in her traditional dress, which she had first thought was a tarp when she’d seen her body under the tree in Dorset Park. She thought of the fiber evidence found on Angela Galvez—the fiber evidence that had come from Ritchie Ouelette’s car—and the DNA evidence in the front seat, which she now knew was the dead little girl’s urine. These concrete details felt more burdensome than illuminating. Now that answers were coming, she did not want them anymore. She wanted to turn her back on them, to run from them. But where was there to run?

Vera wanted to ask:
If this was so terrible, then why did you go on to kill Sufia?
But she knew she was not supposed to ask questions. And she was not sure she wanted to hear this detailed response, anyway. She leaned toward Detective Ferreira, feeling self-conscious about the proximity of her mouth to his ear, and whispered, “Can you ask him what this has to do with me?” What she really meant was,
Can we cut to the chase, please, because I really can’t take much more.
So much for amateur detective skills, she thought; in the face of the truth, her heart and her stomach were deplorably weak.

The detective voiced the question on her behalf, and Frank Ouelette, looking straight at Vera again, said, “Well, I’m up to the part where you come in, kind of.”

He went on to tell her how Jensen had described her new English teacher as being, as he put it, “really into true crime and murder and stuff.” “Jensen had Googled you, and she found out that there’d been a murder in your hometown back when you were in high school. She also found out there were some people back then who’d thought, for a little while, that you’d done it. She was real excited about that. She had this, like, fascination with you or something. Not a crush or anything, but this
interest
because she felt like you and her had something in common. She told me you’d said in class that anyone could kill someone. It got her all worked up, knowing a teacher thought the same way she did.”

“I didn’t say—” Vera began, but she stopped herself. Because she
had
. She
had
said it, but when she had said it, she hadn’t really meant
anyone
. She had only been referring to a certain type of anyone.

“She saw you talking to Sufia Ahmed after class one time and said you seemed mad, that you guys were having some kind of a fight, so she got this idea that maybe we could get rid of Sufia and have everyone think you’d done it. That might give the police someone to look at other than Ritchie—someone who wasn’t me. I didn’t feel right about Ritchie taking the rap. So we thought . . . well, maybe point the finger somewhere else. It was like I’d become a robot. I could do anything anyone told me to at that point, and I wouldn’t feel a thing. Jensen said, ‘All you need to do is grab her by that thing she wears over her head and pull it really tightly around her neck. You can do it from behind, and you won’t even have to look at her.’ So that’s what I did. It was easy to get Sufia to come out with us because she wanted to learn how to skateboard. It was supposed to be me, Jensen, my friend Joey Fitts, and this other kid who goes to Bonny Eagle all teaching her some moves, but when we met up in the park, it was just me and Jensen. Jensen actually didn’t watch. She waited over by the little pond and told me to come get her when I was done. Once I was, we figured we’d leave Sufia in the park because we knew that was right across the street from where you lived.”

Fitts,
Vera thought.
So that’s how I know the name.
“I wasn’t mad at Sufia,” Vera said, starting to tear up.

“Well, Jensen said you had a fight.”

“It wasn’t a fight.”

Ferreira shot Vera another warning look. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking down at her hands folded on top of the table.

She could not drink her coffee anymore. She could not do anything but stare through brimming eyes at Frank Ouelette, who no longer seemed on the verge of tears himself but had become calm and conversational, the second death obviously bothering him less than the first.

“Jensen had one last idea before we left town. She thought maybe we could get rid of you, too. Make it look like you killed yourself. Write a suicide note for you and everything. Maybe one with a confession in it. She was going to invite you to this hotel and do it there all by herself, but I think she chickened out, because nothing came of it.”

“Was she going to use a gun?” Vera asked, remembering the service pistol Jensen had alluded to having with her.
But that wouldn’t have worked,
she thought.
They would have traced it to Les Cudahy so easily. Or maybe,
she thought . . .
maybe a little poison slipped in some vodka and orange juice?

“I don’t know what all she was thinking of doing. I just know we took off later that night—I was waiting for her behind her house, outside the dog fence, and my car was parked down the street. I’d gotten it back from the shop by then. We spent that night on a campground in New Hampshire, and from there we went to Vermont for a while, but that got boring pretty fast, so we ended up in New York City on the Lower East Side with this guy everyone calls Bob the Punk. He’s seriously old-school, like in his forties or something. He’s an all-right guy, though.

“One morning I woke up and Jensen was just gone. She wasn’t in Bob’s squat anymore, and we spent two days looking around for her before we figured she didn’t want to be found.”

Seeing that the monologue had moved away from details of the killings, Vera felt she could almost breathe again. She wanted to go backward, to ask him how he and Jensen had met, how he had come to know this girl—this terrible, monstrous, unfathomable girl whom Vera would never have associated with the Jensen Willard she knew and her journals.

She leaned toward the detective again and murmured, “Can you ask him where he knows Jensen from?”

Frank overheard her and, to her dismay, held her gaze again, his blue eyes guileless and confiding. “She was at my school, but I only talked to her a couple of times before I stopped going. After I dropped out, we still met up in the woods sometimes and kept talking about the same kind of stuff we’d started talking about in phys ed. Crazy stuff—setting fires, putting pipe bombs in the local schools, taking hostages. I never thought anything would come of it.”

Vera thought for a while. Something had begun to occur to her. Forgetting once again that she had been coached not to ask questions to the young boy without a go-between, she found her voice, and clearly said, “You say you met her in phys ed. Was there any reason why she would have ever called you by the name Scotty?”

“Yeah, once in a while. I thought it was dumb. It was after some author she liked—F. Scott Fitzpatrick. Because my real first name is Francis, just like that guy’s, I guess.”

Fitzgerald,
Vera almost said aloud. She thought of the Fitzgerald bookmark that she had used for her copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
and of how one of Jensen’s first-ever comments to her pertained to it—her approval of the ill-fated Scott and Zelda. Had Jensen already done some research on Vera at that point in time? Was it then, or sometime even earlier, that she had pinpointed Vera as someone to be taken advantage of? She remembered how Jensen had emailed her before they had ever even met:
I look forward to meeting you,
her first-ever message had read. Had she already done her research by then and put her in her sights?

Vera could tell Ferreira was annoyed with her for speaking up, but at the same time she could also tell that this was his first time hearing that Scotty and Frank Ouelette Jr. were one and the same. He looked a little chagrined. Perhaps in an effort to take the bull by the horns again, reclaim his position as the one in charge, he turned toward Frank Ouelette’s attorney. “Miss Lundy found a note in New York City that she thinks Willard might have written,” he said. “This is all off the record for now, but I’m sure Miss Lundy would like to know why your client’s friend would have left her such a note, or written a note giving her the idea to come to New York City in the first place.”