Follow Me Down Page 23

  “That’s right. How is Cheryl?” There was only one degree of separation in Wayoata. I remembered Cheryl Fitz; she’d defected from our insular group mid-sophomore year in a frenzied campaign for popularity. It had ended badly. She couldn’t live down a threesome with two guys at a house party, and was thereafter called Cheryl Fitz-All. We welcomed her back with open arms.

  Jenny went on to tell me all about Cheryl, how she was married and living in Boston now. Just had her first baby. A girl. Findlay. Good for Cheryl.

  “I’m surprised you’re here. I mean, God, if I was going through what you’re going through, I think I’d just curl up into a ball and die.”

  “It’s a difficult time.”

  “So do you think he did it?” Jenny’s eyes were practically bulging out of her head. I could tell she was already retelling the gossip to her friends. Guess who dropped by? Lucas Haas’s sister. Yah, can you believe it? I just had to ask.

  I realized then no one had outright asked me that yet.

  “No. Of course not.” She waited for me to say more. I didn’t.

  Jenny looked disappointed, like I’d really let her down. “Oh. Well, come on in. Just slipping a hot dish into the oven.” It’s always a hot dish or hoddish here, never a casserole. The kitchen had obviously just been updated; its ultramodern look did not fit in with the rest of the house. She invited me to sit down at an expansive kitchen island. She wiped up a puddle of water left by a half-empty bag of melting Tater Tots—those made the crunchy top layer of most Wayoatan hoddishes—and tossed out a can of mushroom soup. Jenny shined the granite countertop and showed the rest of the kitchen off like a trophy, opening cupboards as she talked, sliding out drawers. It was a hushed demo, since everything was soft-close. “My husband never knows when I’m mad at him now.” She giggled.

  I accepted an offer for lemonade, which was premixed and in the fridge.

  A girl, who I assumed was Abby, was sitting in the living room in front of a mounted TV, oblivious to my arrival as she watched a home movie of her preteen self practically twerking in a sparkly unitard on a bright stage.

  “Abby, turn that off. Come on in here.” Jenny put her hand up and whispered to me, “No sixteen-year-old should be reliving her glory days.” Abby came sulking into the kitchen. She was of cheerleader stock. Tawny and tiny with honey-colored hair halfway down her back. I noticed a slight hobble as she sat down on a stool next to me.

  “That looks like a pretty bad sprain.”

  “Sprain?” Abby snorted. “Kathy Wilkes broke my ankle in two spots five months ago. I had to miss school for two different surgeries, and I might need a third one.”

  They told me in turns what had happened. Abby and Joanna were rehearsing with Kathy at the studio late one night. They were two weeks away from a competition in New York. Kathy had choreographed both their solos, and as usual, Joanna’s was supposed to be better. It was more sophisticated. Shooting Stars was Wayoata’s only dance studio, and Kathy did win competitions, they reminded me, so everyone just sort of put up with it. But this time, it was obvious that Abby’s solo was way better. Joanna wasn’t trying very hard, and if Jo’s solo wasn’t great, then no one else was allowed to be great.

  Kathy started saying that Abby kept landing a jump with her foot turned inward, but Abby didn’t see it. “After, like, the fiftieth jump—Kathy is such a hard-ass—she came over and bent down, lifted up my left foot to show me how to land, and snap. It happened so fast, it was like I saw the top of her head and then heard the bone crack. I screamed. Kathy denied she even touched me. She said I landed wrong. Joanna said she didn’t see anything but she was right there. She saw what happened. I know it.”

  I pictured Kathy’s washerwoman arms on this tiny-boned girl.

  “All Kathy could say was ‘Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs.’” Abby shook her head.

  “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs?” I repeated it, slow. Blinked rapidly, feeling like I’d just been spritzed in the face with ice water. My skin puckered up; my muscles tightened at each syllable. Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs.

  “Yeah, it’s her catchphrase for everything.”

  “Kathy’s catchphrase?” My voice creaked. My stomach went into spasm.

  “Yeah. She says it all the time.”

  “Like how often?” I asked, anxious.

  Abby made a face at me, then drew out her words, as if I didn’t speak English. “Like all the time.” She shrugged. Oh my God. I’d been trying to think up all sorts of sexual significances for the SpaghettiOs, but I couldn’t. Aside from the obvious vagina and tiny rings of pasta comparison. But it wasn’t a vagina reference. Kathy was behind it. She plotted her own daughter’s sexual assault and ended it with a literal uh-oh, SpaghettiOs. Did Joanna know? Did she wake up with the SpaghettiOs in her lap, or did the boys clean her up after the shots were taken? It was Kathy. Holy shit.

  “Hello? You still with us?” Jenny waved at me.

  “Sorry, yes. So Kathy denied everything?”

  “We’re suing.” Jenny smacked the granite island. “In a way, it’s too bad. Abby was sure she could have brought Joanna around as an eyewitness eventually, but, well.” Tears welled up in Jenny’s eyes. “I guess that’s not going to happen. I have to remind myself things could be worse. I still have my daughter.”

  “So Joanna was afraid of her mother?” I ignored Jenny. I’d become immediately uncomfortable around people who cry on cue, in all the right places. Looked only at Abby.

  “Yeah, totally. Kathy controlled everything about Jo’s life. Joanna had a bunch of injuries over the last couple of years, sprained wrists, twisted ankles; she was always at Dr. Bernard’s. At first I thought it was from Kathy pushing her so hard. Joanna knew how competitive her mom was, which was why I was so pissed that Jo wouldn’t have stood up for me. I mean, sometimes you won’t stand up for yourself, but you will for someone else, right?”

  I made a hmm sound, because I didn’t have anything to add.

  “But then something happened.”

  “What?”

  “I saw Joanna do something that made me think she might’ve been doing it to herself.”

  “Doing what to herself?”

  “Injuring herself. It was weird. One day, this was, like, before my injury, we were in the studio and Kathy had gone to get Joanna something to eat. That was the other thing about Kathy, she was always watching what Joanna ate. It was only smoothies with chia seeds, or fish and steamed vegetables. Kathy called it clean eating but obviously she didn’t follow her own diet and she didn’t want Joanna to get fat like her. Anyway, Joanna said she was going to go outside and get some air. I told her I’d come with, but I had to use the bathroom first. Next thing I knew, Joanna is lying at the bottom of the stairwell holding her knee. It had this bloody gash. She said she tripped but there was something not right about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s not like there was anything to make her trip down the stairs and it’s not like Joanna was eighty years old and her hip gave out. Basically there was no reason she fell. She just did. I think she liked it, being injured or, well, the benefits. She got to sit out of dance for a while. She had time to herself. She got to see Dylan. I mean, even her relationship with Dylan had to be top secret because Kathy would never let Jo have a boyfriend, and that was even before some weed was found in her locker. After that, her brother was practically, like, her babysitter.”

  “How so?”

  “He followed her around, checked in to make sure she was at school. If we went for a coffee or whatever, he’d show up. It was so creepy.”

  “Doesn’t he have a job?”

  “Oh no,” Jenny interjected with a guffaw. “Maybe some part-time work at the grocery store, but Ben has a borderline IQ. Kathy made sure he graduated with everyone else. No one in this town is going to piss off one of the biggest employers, right? This whole thing between us and Kathy is a real David and Goliath story.”

  I gave Jenny an I-know-what-you-mean nod.

>   “Do you know Jo didn’t even come and see me after my first operation? I had to get a pin put in my ankle,” Abby continued. “We’d been dancing together since kindergarten, and it was like she didn’t even know who I was after the assault—that’s what we call it around here. Assault. Her little sister, Madison, did. She brought flowers. She’s a sweet kid. People have the wrong idea about her.”

  “They do?”

  “Kinda, yeah. It’s nothing, really. She just runs a little wild. But Madison was totally on my side. You know what she said? Joanna might’ve even told her mother to do this to me. That Jo only acted all noncompetitive when she was number one, but when my solo turned out to be better than hers, she couldn’t handle it.”

  “We asked if Madison would write out an affidavit, but she said she was too afraid to,” Jenny added.

  “Well, no kidding!” Abby lifted her leg a couple of inches off the floor. “In a way, Madison’s lucky she can’t dance. It means she’s free of Kathy. If Miss Kathy thought you had any talent, then she was a bitch. That was the shitty thing. If she was all sugary nice to you, then you knew you sucked.”

  “Do you think Joanna would have told her mom to hurt you like this?” I didn’t think so, not the Joanna I’d caught a glimpse of in her journal. But then there was that caveat that if the journal was her flirty communiqué with Lucas, then Joanna would be hiding certain sides of herself.

  “One time I saw Jo’s feet—they were like raw ground beef, and her toes were all crooked and blistery. She had to practice that much. I think it was all Kathy.”

  “Do you think Kathy could have hurt Joanna as well?”

  Both Abby and Jenny recoiled slightly. It was too much of a stretch for them, I guess, that Kathy could go from breaking legs to murder.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Not her little superstar. I mean, that’s why she broke my daughter’s leg, so Joanna could win. It was all about Joanna, so why would she—” Jenny started. She licked her lips; she finally had her slab of gossip:… And guess what she wanted to know? If Kathy did it. Can you believe it? And we’re right in the middle of it all.

  “I guess I never thought about it,” Abby interrupted. “Everyone just said Mr. Haas did it. ’Cept for Josh Kolton, who keeps saying the lunch lady did it, but he’s a total stoner. But maybe. I wouldn’t put it past Kathy. I mean, look at what she did to my ankle; that takes a certain kind of person, right? And Joanna didn’t want to move to New York; that was Kathy’s plan. That they were going to live together. And there’s something else. Something Joanna told me that made her mom sound totally psycho.” Abby paused, let the word “psycho” linger. It took sheer willpower not to shake it out of her. “When Jo was, like, twelve, Kathy was doing her hair for a jazz recital, and there were too many tangles for Kathy, and so she just cut it all off. Like, grabbed a pair of sewing scissors and just chopped it into this awful chin-length bob, all uneven and jagged.”

  I could almost feel the silky texture of Joanna’s hair between my fingertips. Kathy killed her daughter because her little superstar didn’t want to be her superstar anymore. Or because she was pregnant! If Madison saw the pregnancy test in the garbage, then Kathy could have as well. No wonder Joanna’s funeral was held less than forty-eight hours after her body was found. It meant that she had to have been cremated just hours after the autopsy. Kathy wanted zero opportunity for her daughter’s body to be exhumed, in case something turned up that incriminated her. Maybe she paid the players to humiliate Joanna too, to literally chasten her, and when that didn’t work and Joanna ended up pregnant, she just snapped and then she needed someone to take the fall.

  Suddenly, I could see it. It wouldn’t be hard. Kathy dropping in on the drunk caretaker. Maybe she brings a bottle and some concerned chatter about her younger daughter spending so much time there. He passes out; she slips the key off the ring. Lets herself in. Plants Joanna’s journal, her hair. This would have to be after she knew Lucas wasn’t coming back. How could she know that, unless she’d done something to him? But why frame Lucas? Because he was sleeping with Joanna? Maybe that was all the reason she needed. Of course, there was that niggling fact that the journal and hair were in one of Lucas’s old hiding spots. It would have made better sense for Kathy to put it somewhere more obvious so the police could find it, but maybe she thought it would seem less authentic that way.

  “And you know what? I never bought the whole Mr. Haas and Joanna secret relationship thing. So many girls threw themselves at him and would have gladly given him whatever he wanted, but he always shot them down. So why Joanna of all people? I mean, Haas turned down way hotter girls than her. He could’ve taken me out to the woods anytime he felt like it.”

  “ABBY!” Jenny sputtered on her lemonade. “How could you say such a thing? Did he touch you?”

  The conversation was over.

  18

  Wayoata’s skate park was a run-down little embedded bowl not far from a grazing pasture. There was no parking lot, so I parked on the side of the road. I tapped out two Xanax. I know I resolved not to take any pills today but I needed a little something to get past these crawly, fire-ant pinches on my skin. Tomorrow I’ll stop (and yes I knew that was the addicts’ classic sales pitch to themselves but tomorrow really did work better for me). I washed the pills down with warm bottled water and walked in. The air was heavy with cow dung. Serious weed smokers hung out at either Dickson Park or the skate park, at least in my day. I was trying the skate park first. Three lonely-looking skaters circled around each other as two girls watched, sharing a wine cooler, their legs dangling over the lip of the bowl.

  They looked up when I approached. One of the girls waved. Friendly.

  “Is Josh Kolton here?” I asked. It was a long shot that he’d be here, but then again, it was summer in Wayoata and there wasn’t a whole lot to do. The girl squinted her eyes, tried to follow the trio of boys gliding back and forth, and then just pointed at the center of the bowl, which didn’t help at all.

  The girl sitting next to her cried out, “Joshie … you’re in trouble!”

  “Joshie” rolled up to the lip of the bowl and kicked his skateboard into his hands. He was a shaggy-haired kid with a knitted cap, despite the heat, that stood up high on his head like it was made of meringue.

  “Yeah?” He walked toward me, as I moved away from the girls.

  I introduced myself as Mr. Haas’s sister. I noticed Josh held his skateboard a little bit more tightly and angled in such a way that it would shield him in case murdering Westfield students ran in our family. “Sorry to bother you, but I’ve heard around that you witnessed someone, not my brother, with Joanna the day she went missing.” I didn’t specify “lunch lady.” I wanted to hear it directly from Josh.

  “Yep. No one believes me, but I swear I saw the lunch lady. I even got suspended over making inappropriate comments about school staff. Three sweet days off.”

  I asked him exactly where he was standing, how far he’d been from Joanna. The girls were making impatient noises.

  “I was sitting at one of the picnic tables, and I saw Joanna first. I yelled, ‘Hey, JoJo,’ at her. She turned around and waved at me. I thought she was going to come over, but she just kept hiking into the woods.”

  “So you saw Joanna for sure?” The picnic tables were a good distance from the trail.

  “Yeah, she waved at me.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I was looking for my lighter to spark one up and then not even a minute later, the lunch lady came up behind her on the trail. It was, like, weird because I’ve never seen the lunch lady in Dickson Park before. She wasn’t with anyone.”

  “What did she look like? What was she wearing?”

  “I can’t remember what she was wearing, but it was her. I know it was. Then Joanna went missing. It’s like that fat bitch ate her or something.” He said this last part really loud, hand cupped around his mouth, laughed this loose-jawed haw, haw, but when his mouth closed again, it was
tight and serious. “I saw the lunch lady. I told the police, but they thought I was just stoned.”

  “I believe you.”

  “You do?” His dull eyes sharpened.

  I nodded. “I do. I believe you saw a woman, maybe not the lunch lady per se, but someone who looked like her.” From far away, the lunch lady was the right height, the right build to be Kathy. The hair color was wrong. Kathy had blondish hair, and the lunch lady had dark hair. Still, if it was late afternoon and the lighting poor, then it would be easy to mistake hair color.

  * * *

  As I started back toward my car, I saw the black truck idling behind it. I slipped behind a straggly bush, pulled out my phone, and dialed Garrett. It went to voice mail. Tried again. Voice mail. I couldn’t even see the license plate number because the truck was right up against my bumper. I left a panicky message. “Garrett, it’s Mia, someone’s been following me. I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s Tom Geller. He’s tried to run me off the road a couple of times already. I’ll send you a picture of the truck.”

  I held my phone between the branches and zoomed in but was still too far away. I wanted the plate number or his face. The only way I could think to get a clear shot was to run at the truck, paparazzi style, take a picture, and run back to the skate park before he could mow me down.

  I held my phone out in front of me and started to jog toward the truck. My heart was in my ears, beating frantically, like the wings of a trapped insect. Inside the cab, all I could see was a man in sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down low hunched over the steering wheel. I aimed my phone at him, his truck. The truck shot backward, then pivoted into the middle of the road leaving snaky black tracks. Filling the air with burned rubber. I moved to follow him, a stupid rather than ballsy move, and kept trying to get shots of the plate, but whatever I managed to snap was likely blurry. He just kept backing up.

  The truck stopped a couple of hundred yards away. The front grille glinted in the low sun. I zoomed in as much as I could and pointed my phone at the plate, my finger was about to press the camera button when the engine revved. The truck gunned forward, fast, straight toward me.