Killer's Cousin
Authors: Nancy Werlin
ELL ME SOMETHING
“Look,” I said, “you better leave. I want to unpack by myself.” And, as she continued to kneel there on the floor, I walked to the open door and stood by it.
She waited just past the point at which I was sure she wasn't going to move. Then she got up, elaborately dusting off her knees. “Tell me something,” she said, as if casually. “How did you feel when she went down?”
All the air left the room.
Lily was leaning forward, her gaze avid, sucking at mine. “Tell me. Did you feel â¦
powerful?
Were you glad? Even ⦠for just a minute?”
I had words, somewhere inside me, but for a long moment they were formless. I thought,
She's just a kid, she's just a kid
, but that didn't help. Greg and Emily and I had been kids, too. Being under eighteen didn't mean you were innocent. Or harmless.
OTHER BOOKS BY NANCY WERLIN
Are You Alone on Purpose?
Black Mirror
Double Helix
Impossible
Locked Inside
The Rules of Survival
KILLER'S
COUSIN
NANCY WERLIN
speak
An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
SPEAK
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First published in the United States of America by Delacorte Press, 1998
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2009
Copyright © Nancy Werlin, 1998
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Werlin, Nancy.
The killer's cousin / Nancy Werlin.
p. cm.
Summary: After being acquitted of murder, seventeen-year-old David goes to stay with relatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he finds himself forced to face his past as he learns more about his strange young cousin Lily.
EISBN: 9781101576939
[1. Emotional problemsâFiction. 2. CousinsâFiction. 3. GuiltâFiction. 4. MurderâFiction. 5. Family problems âFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W4713Ki 2009
[Fic]âdc22
2008024294
Printed in the United States of America
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
For my parents,
Elaine and Arnold Werlin,
with love and gratitude
PROLOGUE
M
y name, David Bernard Yaffe, will sound familiar, but you won't remember whyâat least not at first. Most people, I've found, do not. I'm grateful for that. It gives me some space, however brief. However certain eventually to disintegrate.
When you do remember, it won't be my face you recall. Not that the press didn't shoot plenty of pictures. But it's the photograph of my parents that was famous. That's the one that's developing now in your mind's eye, behind your concentrated frown.
A regular-looking couple in their early fifties. The man thick-haired, blue-eyed. Groomed. The woman's emotions shielded by dark glasses, but her hands betraying her as they clutch the man's coat sleeve, biting through to the arm beneath. His other hand is over hers, comfortingâbut the man's attention is clearly elsewhere, ahead. Behind them, you can just see the
bleak facade of the courthouse in Baltimore on a bitterly cold day.
The man is looking directly into the camera. I can read his expression, but I defy you to do so. He is practiced at concealing his thoughts, my father. He's a lawyer. A
criminal
lawyer. You'll remember that now, too. Some of the tabloids said it was why I got off.
Behind-scenes wheeling and dealing?
they asked.
Powerful litigator calls in favors?
they hinted.
You'd like to know, I'm sure. Everyone would like to know. But I won't lead you on. Thisâthe story I have to tellâis not about me and it is not about that. I won't deceive you about it, because I am at this moment no more willing to talk about Emily and what happened my senior year of high schoolâmy first senior yearâthan I ever was.
No, this is about my second senior year. About Lily. Lily, cousin of a killer. My Massachusetts cousin. Lily.
I need to talk about Lily.
M
y cousin Lily was eleven years old when I moved into the third floor of my uncle Vic and aunt Julia's triple-decker house at the northern end of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I drove to Cambridge from Baltimore, dully, doggedly, through one long day in sticky late-August heat the summer ⦠the summer after. My car had air-conditioning, but I kept the windows down and let the fierce hot wind off Interstate 95 slam me in the face and chest. I couldn't be bothered to switch CDs, and so I listened over and over to R.E.M. doing the firehouse songâthe only one on the album that really penetrated.
I was almost eighteen, but instead of packing for college, I was headed for a private prep school where I would repeat my senior year of high school. I needed to do it, needed to finish and finish well, if I was to have any chance of getting into what my father called a
“decent college.” If I was to get my life “back on track.”
“As if I were a train,” I'd said to them.
“You'll care later,” my mother said. “Davey ⦔ She faltered over my old nickname and then went on. “David, I swear it. I promise.”
What could I say to that? I had no better ideas. Just revulsion. Just general, all-purpose, constant nausea.
I knew I should be grateful that Vic and Julia had agreed to take me. Grateful for shelter far from Baltimore; grateful to be away from the Baltimore and D.C. press. From my ex-friends. From my parents. Grateful to have a future at all. Grateful, grateful, grateful. I knew what I was supposed to feel.
“Vic and Julia and Lily are your family,” my mother said, urgent to persuade me. “Families stick together in ⦔ She hesitated, as always. “In crises. Let them help you, David. Let them help us. Please.”
In a way it was hilarious, hearing my mother sing the praises of her brother, Vic Shaughnessy, and his wife, Julia. Because the fact was, our family hadn't had much to do with theirs, and it wasn't because Maryland to Massachusetts was too far to travel. We stayed distant from my mother's family because, in my childhood, my mother and her sister-in-law were engaged in ongoing guerrilla warfare.
“Well, look,” my mother would say, ripping open a thick cream envelope in mid-December. “Julia's gone all out on the Christmas cards this year. A Botticelli Madonna! Religious, but so tasteful!” And she would fire back an envelope containing a construction-paper menorah (commissioned from me) plus the contents of
half a tube of silver glitter. “Imagine it, Stuart,” she'd say to my father triumphantly. “Glitter all over Julia's clean floor.”
“Eileen,” my father would say, his eyes amused, “is this necessary?”
“Absolutely.”
It was no secret that Julia disapproved of my parents' marriage and of our Judaism. Of my mother's in-your-face conversion from Catholicism. And, in those innocent days, my mother positively enjoyed disliking Julia. “Behave yourself,” she would threaten me, “or I'll pack you off to Cambridge to live with your aunt Julia and go to Catholic school with your cousin Kathy!” At that time, Lily, twelve years younger than her sister, Kathy, had not yet started school.
Odd that all these years later, my mother really had packed me off to Massachusetts to live with Vic and Julia, and to enroll in the same Catholic prep school that Kathy had attended.
I remembered Kathy vividly, though we'd met only once, when Lily was born. I'd been seven, and fascinated with my pretty older cousin. I loved Kathy's red hair; her laugh. I followed her everywhere that week she stayed with us, and she let me. She spent her own money at the corner store to buy me ice cream.
She had been dead four years now, Kathy.
“Stuart, they understand something of what we're feeling,” my mother had said to my father, after Vic called and made the offer. I wasn't meant to overhear. “Because of Kathy,” my mother said. “Because of Kathy, my brother understands.”
* * *
The words
back on track, back on track
took up a measured beat in my head as I went through Central Square and, following Vic's directions, got myself on Massachusetts Avenue and nosed north.
At the umpteenth light I spotted the sign for Walden Street. I signaled for a left-hand turn, waited for the light to turn yellow and narrowly avoided colliding with an oncoming car whose driver audibly swore at me. My stomach clenched; I was too shocked even to swear back. And in that flash of dangerâthe few seconds when the Cambridge driver ignored traffic laws and barreled straight into my right-of-wayâI suddenly knew something. I didn't want to die.
Other cars were honking furiously at me. I opened my eyes. Gently, I pressed on the gas again and pulled onto Walden, and then, a few streets later, onto Vic and Julia's street.
Like its neighbors, Hubbardston Street in North Cambridge was one-way and narrow, packed with tall wood frame houses, and full of screaming kids on Rollerblades playing street hockey. Confused by the kids and by the way each house had multiple numbers, I drove past No. 87 and had to go around the block again. This time I found Vic and Julia's driveway. I backed into it with difficulty, turned off the car's motor, and looked out at the house.