All Unquiet Things (29 page)

“Hello?” She sounded wary, like a girl who wouldn’t normally answer a call from an unfamiliar number.

“My name is Neily Monroe. I’m a friend of Lila Rosenberg’s.”

“Oh.” She paused. “Is Lila okay?”

“She’s great. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Toby Pinto.”

“What?”

“Toby Pinto. I think you knew him at Brighton.”

“Is this some kind of sick joke?”

“No joke, I promise. I heard you got the Bean suspended three years ago. I need to know why.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Please don’t. Look, Allison, I know this is a major invasion of privacy, but you accused the Bean of stalking you and I’m afraid he might have done the same thing to another girl—my ex-girlfriend. So if you could just help me out here …”

“Another girl?”

“Carly Ribelli.”

Allison repeated the name, then stopped suddenly. “Isn’t she that girl who died?”

“Yeah. Are you starting to see why this is so important?”

She hesitated. “I barely knew the Bean. He asked me out a couple of times and I kept saying no, I had a boyfriend, but he wouldn’t stop. And then he just started showing up random
places where I’d be. At the grocery store when I was there with my mom, at the diner, at the gym. He was everywhere. Sometimes I’d look out my window at night and his car would be parked across the street. I even called the cops once, but he left before they got there.”

“Did he ever write you any letters?” I asked.

“E-mails, yeah. Creepy ones. That’s how they proved it was him—they traced the e-mail address back to him. I filed for a restraining order, then I left school—I thought this was all over.”

“You’re sure that he never sent you anything besides those e-mails? He never dropped notes in your locker or your mailbox at home? Slipped something under your door?”

“Nope. Just the e-mails.”

“And it stopped when you transferred?”

“Pretty much.”

“Have you heard from him since then?”

“No. Thank God.”

After fifth period, on my way to lunch, I stopped by my locker to drop off a few books and found a note folded at the bottom. It wasn’t another article—it was smaller, handwritten. It said:
If the fall doesn’t kill you, the crocodile will. 4:30 today
. I read it twice, then folded it up and put it in my pocket. There was no telling who wrote it—I wouldn’t know until I met them—but I was sure I knew what it meant.

I hadn’t been to the Oakland Zoo since I was ten years old. I had gone on a school field trip there once, and I remembered just where they kept the big reptiles. I knew what the note meant
because I’d seen the words before, on a sign hanging over the crocodile pit at the Sydney Aquarium. The biology teacher had a photograph of it in his classroom. I must’ve passed it at least twice a day while walking through the science building, just like everybody else at Brighton.

At four-thirty on the dot, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Oz?” He squared his shoulders and stared at me but didn’t speak. Trying to lighten the mood, I gestured to the pit. “You know that’s an alligator? They don’t have crocodiles here.”

He shrugged, but still said nothing.

“Did Adam send you?”

“He told me how he pulled a gun on you yesterday.”

I nodded, backing away slowly. “We’re not going to have a repeat of that, are we? I got the message the first time.”

Oz shook his head. “That’s why I had you meet me in a public place. So you’d know I wasn’t here to beat you up or anything. I just want to talk.”

“Look, I’m not going to turn you guys in,” I told him. “Your business is … your business. I’m not looking to mess things up for you.”

“This isn’t about the drugs,” Oz said. “Or, it is, but not directly.”

“Okay. So talk.”

He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Did you ever hear of a girl named Laura Brandt?”

“No.” It seemed smart to keep a lid on my knowledge. Any explanation of how I knew a girl who lived several towns away and with whom I had no friends in common would inevitably lead back to Carly’s diary, and I didn’t want anyone to know that Audrey and I had found it. “Does she go to Brighton?”

“No. She was homeschooled.”

I waited, but he said nothing else. “What does she have to do with me?”

“I heard you’re investigating Carly’s murder. Is that true?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I think I have some information for you.”

I tried to gauge his expression. “Then I am. Well, sort of. Trying, anyway.”

“Laura and I go back a long way. We were both home-schooled when we were younger, and we were both in this so-cial group some of the mothers set up to help us make friends.”

“I guess you knew her pretty well, then.”

“Yeah, we were close. Even though I ended up going to Brighton and she stayed homeschooled, we hung out a lot.”

Something told me that Oz and Laura were more than friends, or at least Oz had wanted them to be. “What happened to her?”

Oz ran his fingers through his dark hair, fidgeting. “I don’t know. She just—disappeared.”

“She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

“A couple of years ago, I introduced her to Adam and they got to be friends. She’d hang out with us a lot, even got close to Carly. She’d been doing drugs for a little while, but Adam got her hooked on some strong stuff.”

“You just let him do that to her?”

“I figured it was her choice, and who was I to tell her not to? I mean, I deal the stuff, I’m not exactly innocent here.”

“Fine. She was hooked on, what, coke?”

He nodded. “About three months before Carly died, Laura ODed on cocaine—or, what she thought was pure cocaine. The doctors at the hospital told her that the coke she bought from Adam had been cut with Special K.”

“Special K?”

“That’s its street name—the medical term is ketamine. Adam gets it over the counter from a vet in Tijuana.”

“A vet?”

“Yeah. They use it to put down big animals. Anyway, Special K in powder form looks like cocaine, but it’s a pretty powerful hallucinogen, sort of like PCP. It can do some pretty horrible shit to you when you mix it with as much coke as Laura had in her system that day.”

“What did it do to her?”

“Put her in a coma. She was lucky. Most of the time, people who OD on ketamine and coke end up brain damaged or dead. Anyway, at first she pretended not to remember who sold her the junk, but once she found out about the ketamine she got really angry. She started talking about turning Adam in, about going to the police and providing testimony that would get him locked up.”

“He probably could’ve wriggled his way out of it,” I said bitterly. “Daddy’s money would’ve gotten him off the hook.”

“Maybe, if he was some small-time dope dealer, but Adam’s into some pretty big shit. He’s partners with this guy named Barton; you’d never believe how big.”

“So?”

“So I wasn’t the only person Laura mouthed off to about this. I told her not to say anything, that I’d ask Adam about the Special K, but she wouldn’t listen. She was going into rehab, and she kept saying that when she got back she was going to blow the lid off Adam’s entire operation. She was crazy. She wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“Who else did she tell?”

Oz said nothing, but from the look in his eyes I could guess.

“Carly?”

“Yeah. For whatever reason, she trusted Carly. I told Laura not to, that it was a mistake, but she kept saying that Carly was planning on leaving Adam and was going to help her bring him down.”

“You think Carly tipped Adam off that Laura was going to talk to the police?”

“She must’ve, because he definitely found out.”

“If Carly was going to break up with Adam, why would she warn him about Laura’s plans?”

“Maybe,” Oz said, “she
lied
.”

“How did Adam react?” I asked.

“He lost it, started threatening her. He got the Bean to run her off the road one day when she was driving up the freeway—she almost rolled her car into a ditch.”

“The Bean?”

“Yeah. Anyway, she was shaken up, but right before she went to rehab she swore to me she was still going to do it. She begged me to get out before she did, and I was going to, but then—”

“Then?”

“She was in rehab for three weeks in Arizona, then she checked herself out and never came back.”

“She just vanished?”

Oz shrugged. “She committed herself voluntarily, so she could leave whenever she felt like it, but she was really serious about getting clean. I can’t believe she would just disappear, unless somebody talked her into it.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. The Bean, maybe.”

“Why would she listen to the Bean if he ran her off the road?”

“She didn’t know who did it, and I didn’t even find out until a couple of months ago. She liked the Bean; she thought they were friends. The people she trusted the most in the group were me, Carly, and the Bean, and I didn’t do it. I thought Carly might have, but she was in town that whole week.”

“What do you think happened to Laura?”

“At first I thought that maybe they offered her money to disappear. She was eighteen, so it wasn’t like she would be considered a runaway. And she was hard up for cash, which Adam knew. If he couldn’t intimidate her, I thought maybe he’d bribe her to shut up and go away.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing really, except the night before Carly died, she and Adam had a fight at Lucy Miller’s End of Summer party. Everyone heard them yelling at each other, and I’m pretty sure I heard Laura’s name come up. Carly said something about Adam turning her into a monster, and she screamed, ‘What happened to Laura?’”

“Man.”

“Yeah.” Oz stared at the ground.

“Why don’t you go to the police?”

“I don’t have any proof. And if I betray Adam, I might disappear too.”

“So why are you telling me all this?”

“I don’t know. I just thought that maybe, if Carly found out what happened to Laura and got pissed enough to do something about it, that might be the reason she’s dead.”

“You don’t believe Enzo Ribelli killed her?”

He shook his head. “This makes more sense to me, with what I heard and what I know.”

“What else did you hear that night?”

“Not much. The music drowned out most of what they were saying, and Adam took Carly into a bedroom once she started to get really upset. I didn’t see either of them after that.”

Remembering Audrey’s theory about the Bean, I asked, “Was the Bean at the party?”

Oz paused, then said, “Yeah. He left sometime around two o’clock. He was so drunk, he hit a mailbox backing out of the driveway.”

I got the phone message from Carly around two-thirty. I was fairly certain that she had left the party by then. “Did he leave with Carly?”

Oz shrugged. “I don’t know. She did leave, though, because I stayed the night and when I woke up she was gone.”

“Who was there with you in the morning?”

“Just Lucy, Adam, and Cass. Cass went to brunch with Audrey, and I went over to Cass’s house later. When I left at five, they were on the couch playing video games.”

Adam’s alibi was that they had stayed on that couch, playing video games, for the rest of the night, and it hinged on Cass’s testimony, which he had given eagerly, if not truthfully. Enzo’s lawyer told Audrey that the whole time the DA was arraigning Enzo and building up the case against him, the police were running a concurrent investigation into Adam, but if that was true it must’ve been a pretty cursory affair—they hadn’t dug up anything about Adam’s drug dealing, or so I assumed since the papers hadn’t gotten wind of it and he wasn’t behind bars. That made sense to me; nobody with an ounce of self-preservation
would’ve rolled over on Adam. It all came down to his alibi—they could neither prove that Cass was lying about being with Adam that evening nor prove that Adam had been anywhere else during the hours surrounding the murder. Eventually, under pressure from the district attorney’s office, which already had its criminal behind bars, they dropped it. I was not so easily put off.

It was my belief that Cass was lying to cover for his friend. I couldn’t quite figure out why, unless it was under duress—maybe Adam had threatened him, or Audrey, if Cass didn’t keep his mouth shut about where Adam really was that evening. Somehow Cass must’ve been compromised, and taking into account their most recent rift and his lingering feelings for Audrey, she was now in a prime position to drag it all out of him—if I could convince her to see things my way.

“I’ll look into it,” I told Oz. “I just have one more question.”

“Sure.”

“You said Special K was a powder?”

“Yeah, but you can also get it as a liquid. Lots of people pour a dose into a drink, but that’s not really smart. Special K mixed with alcohol can knock you right out.”