Rosebush (17 page)

“What?” I was bewildered. “I fought with Langley and Kate? Did they tell you that?”

“No, but several people witnessed you yelling at them and walking away from a room you’d been in with them saying”—she flipped through her notebook—“that’s it, it’s over, I’m ending this.”

I had a flash memory then of Langley in front of the door of a room. It’s dark; the door is beige with gilding around the moldings of the panels. Her hand is on the knob; it’s gold. Or was it Kate? It was all hazy, a blur. But I didn’t remember fighting with either of them.

This was horrible. I was losing my mind. I couldn’t remember, but I knew,
knew
, I wouldn’t have drugged Nicky. Would I? I felt battered, exhausted, like I could no longer separate truth from illusion. I had to get a grip. Find the facts.

“What else did people tell you?” I asked, forcing myself to refocus on the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hospital room. But the nausea in the pit of my stomach, the growing sense of dread, of being about to drown in my own self-doubt, didn’t leave me.

“That you weren’t alone when you left the party, although no one seems to have observed who you were with. Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

I was crying now. “I don’t know what you want from me. I’ve told you everything I can.”

“You didn’t tell me about the cup with the drugged drink in it until now.”

“I only remembered it a little while ago.” Please, I wanted to beg. Please believe me.

“Right.” She nodded once, desultorily.

“I had no reason to drug Nicky.” A thought dawned on me like sunlight slicing through storm clouds. “If you believe her, that I put something in the cup, that means I drugged myself. Why would I do that?”

She gazed at me as though I’d just walked into a trap. “Why would you kneel in front of a speeding car?”

“What if I didn’t see the car? What if I didn’t know it was there?”

“An invisible car?” Given her tone, I was surprised she didn’t snort.

The storm clouds closed up over me again and I felt like I was being sucked into darkness. Everything Officer Rowley said made me more confused, more unsure of what really happened. My memory felt like the gap-toothed smile of a creepy crone from a fairy tale, where the spaces between her teeth give you glimpses of a scary dark place that wants to eat you up alive.

Officer Rowley kept talking, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Because I knew what was bothering me now. I was back at the party, thinking about the plastic cup.

I put the drink down and left it there.

Which meant I didn’t drink any. So it didn’t matter what was in it.

But this discovery did nothing to help my case at all. Because it didn’t answer the question of how the drug
did
get into my system. And it only made it look more likely that I knew there was something wrong with the cup and purposely avoided it.

It only made me look more guilty.

“That’s all for right now, Miss Freeman,” Officer Rowley wrapped up. “Do you have anything to add?”

I was trapped. The truth wasn’t what was going to help me.

“No.”

Chapter 16

“
A dollar seventy-nine for
your thoughts,” Langley’s voice said from the door of my room. I must have been really distracted because I hadn’t heard her approach. I looked at the clock and saw that it was a little past noon. “Not that they’re not worth more, it’s just that’s all the cash I have on me.”

As she walked into my room, she slid her phone into the outside pocket of her Miu Miu purse, which was weird, because she always kept her phone inside. She’d only put on mascara and lip gloss, and she was wearing a T-shirt and cardi with baggy jeans, leopard flats, and a newsboy cap over her hair but no other accessories, which made her much less put together than usual, like maybe she rushed here.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She looked aghast. “Am I okay? You’re the one we’re supposed to be worrying about. That is so you, jelly bean. I’m fine, don’t think about me.”

“You’re lying. What’s going on?”

Her face fell apart in an instant. “It’s Popo. He’s—there’s been a bit of a setback.”

“Oh, Langley, I’m so sorry.”

She wiped her eyes, pulled a hair off her sweater. Swallowed. He and her grandmother had raised Langley together since she came to live with them, but Popo and Langley had a special bond.

He was the one who started her car every morning in the winter to make sure the heater would be putting out warm air by the time she got in. He was the one who attended all her dressage competitions, always with some little piece of jewelry or object that she’d been secretly coveting as a present. He was the one who snuck her wads of hundred-dollar bills “in case she needed a soda” at the mall. He wrote the letters to her when she was away for the summer school session at Gordonstoun in Scotland, and he was the one who sat by her bedside reading
Little Women
when she had a cold, even now.

Or he had until recently. Although the name Lawrence Archibald Winterman, former president of New Jersey Gas and Electric and chair of a dozen boards, still commanded towering admiration, the man himself was in decline. Six months ago, he’d fallen down the back stairs of the house and broken his hip and it wasn’t healing as well as it should. Since then, despite the care of a full-time nurse, he’d had infection after infection, each one taking a toll on the whole family.

“What is it this time?”

“He’s having chest pains. The doctor is running some tests, but we won’t get the results until Tuesday. I think it’s because of my grandmother.”

Langley’s grandmother was convinced that the nurses they had to care for Popo were stealing from her, so she was constantly trying to sneak up on them and installing surveillance devices to catch them in the act. All her precautions had really achieved was to create an atmosphere of tension and a rotating string of nurses who quit because they found the conditions intolerable.

“She’s just looking for something to control,” Langley explained with a resigned smile. “She’s like my mother that way. When disruptive things happened in one part of her life, things she couldn’t stop like the air-conditioning in the trailer breaking, she’d become extra rigid in another part and put us on some crazy diet or become obsessed with my posture.”

It was hard to imagine Langley as anything other than a pampered East Coast girl living in a palace, but she’d actually spent the first eleven years of her life living in a trailer outside of Tucson, Arizona.

Once, when I asked Langley what it was like, she’d said, “The trailer was so snug with the two of us in it, it was like living inside a doll’s house.”

“Maman practically bought out the entire stuffed-animal selection at FAO Schwartz when we found out Langley was coming to us,” her grandfather told me one day when the three of us were having tea in his study. “And that first night Langley took them all, the giant deer, the giraffe, the lion, and used them to drape a sheet and make a tent so she could feel cozy because her new room was too big. That’s my girl.” He’d squeezed her hand and looked at her with such pride that I was jealous. “That’s my resourceful, smart girl.”

I hadn’t learned why Langley went to live with her grandparents until the class ski trip to Killington my first year in Livingston. Everyone else was excited to go in the Jacuzzi after skiing, but Langley and I had both said we’d rather stay on the mountain longer. In my case, anyway, it was a lie—it was a dreary, freezing day—and I’d changed into jeans and a big nubby fisherman’s sweater and gone and hidden myself in the snack bar. It was a cavernous octagonal space with a wooden-beam ceiling and huge windows looking out at the mountains. Because everyone else was on the slopes, the wood-plank tables arrayed around the octagon were nearly all empty.

Until five minutes after I sat down, when Langley slid in next to me. She was wearing jeans, camel-colored Louis Vuitton snow boots, and a light-blue parka with white fur trim around the hood that perfectly framed her face.

“Okay, jelly bean. What’s your excuse? Why aren’t you going to the Jacuzzi party?”

I felt my breath catch. Her directness caught me off guard. “It’s a long story.”

She looked at her watch. “I’m guessing that we have a couple hours before everyone gets bored and wrinkled and forgets we weren’t there so we won’t have to answer any questions about why. If it’s longer than that, I might need popcorn.”

“Why don’t you want to go in?” I asked as she slid out of the parka and pulled the sleeves of her white thermal shirt up over her knuckles.

“You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

She and Kate and I had been nearly inseparable for two-and-a-half months, but this was the first time I had really been alone with Langley. I don’t know if it was that I wanted her to like me or if it was just that I really needed to tell someone. Without thinking, I blurted, “Last November, back in Chicago, my best friend, Bonnie, died in a Jacuzzi.” The words sounded strange—like a character in a movie was saying them, not me.

Langley’s light-blue eyes got huge. “My God. I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“I don’t know, really.” I watched the steam come off my hot chocolate, letting it pull me into the memory. I was afraid, but also slightly exhilarated. I’d never discussed this with anyone before. “It was at a party,” I said finally.

When I’d told Bonnie about the party, her reaction had been, “No and also Way.”

“You can try all your mind tricks on me, Jedi,” she’d said, “and I shall not waver. Why would you want to go to that? I don’t even know any of those people and neither do you. Plus your mother is never going to let you go to a party thrown by a junior.”

Bonnie had a brother who was a few years older than her, which meant her parents had gotten being protective out of their system, but my mother hadn’t and was worse ever since my dad had died earlier that year.

“I’ll sneak out,” I’d said. “And not knowing them is why we
should
go. To meet new people. Do you want to die without being kissed?” I pulled out my best Jedi mind trick. “I heard Mark Ellis was going.”

It had been a little crooked to name her senior crush, but it had worked.

“Fine. I’ll go as your chaperone,” she’d agreed at last. “But for the record, this is a seriously bad idea. I’m packing my paperback
Harry Potter
in my bag so at least I have something to do while you’re making a fool of yourself.”

Langley’s voice came to me then, across the scarred wooden table of the ski-lodge snack bar, saying, “Did she hit her head? How did she die?”

“I—I don’t really know. I was off with someone else. By the time I saw her, she was just lying there in the Jacuzzi, with her head lolling back and her dark hair floating all around her, gazing up at the sky like she was looking for the Big Dipper. She looked beautiful, peaceful. Like Ophelia from Hamlet, you know?” Langley nodded. “Her face was such a perfect pale oval in the moonlight and her eyes glittered. At first I couldn’t believe she was dead. And then—” I stopped. Hot tears came running unexpectedly down my cheeks and fell into my hot chocolate.

Langley put an arm on my back. “Then what happened?”

I met her eyes. “Then all I could think was, God, she needed her eyebrows plucked.” I started to sob then for real, huge shaking sobs that racked my entire body. “Can you believe that? She was dead and that was all I could think of. Her eyebrows.” I pressed the palms of my hands to my eyes, jamming the tears back in. I didn’t deserve to cry about this, didn’t deserve any sympathy.

“That happens a lot,” Langley said, rubbing my back. Her voice was soothing, kind. Maternal. “That you fixate on one weird detail. It’s normal.”

I kept my head in my hands. “They said she OD’d. That she committed suicide.”

“Did she?”

“That’s what they said.”

There was a beat of silence. Langley broke it saying in the kindest, sweetest voice, “That must have been awful for you, jelly bean. Just awful.”

I lowered my head to the table, cradling it in my arms. “I made her go to the party,” I said, just loud enough to be heard. It was another confession I’d never made to anyone. “She didn’t want to go and I made her go. If I hadn’t convinced her to go, it wouldn’t have happened. If only I had—”

“No,” Langley said. “Stop that right now. Your making her go did not make her take her life.”