Very Bad Things (16 page)

Katie stopped and turned around.

Tessa swallowed. Her mouth was bone dry. “I thought he’d dialed me by mistake. He was rambling so badly I could hardly understand him. He said there was an accident … that she wasn’t breathing.”

“What are you talking about?” Katie took a step toward her. “Who drunk-dialed you? You can’t mean Mark?”

“Yeah,” Tessa said. “I mean Mark.”

Katie let her bag slide to the floor with a thump. “Liar,” she said, with such force it felt like a knife in Tessa’s heart. “Mark wouldn’t call you if he was dying and you were the last person left on earth.”

“He was desperate.”

“He’d never be
that
desperate.” Katie exhaled loudly. “What a story, Tessa!” She shook her head. “How long did it take you to make it up? Almost two weeks, I guess, since Rose disappeared.”

“He made me swear I wouldn’t tell!” Tessa couldn’t give up. Katie had to understand. “He threatened to have me expelled!”

“Liar,” Katie said again.

“I’m not.” Tessa squished her eyes closed, the words echoing inside her head.
You’re a liar!
their adopted mother had shouted at Peter whenever he’d denied stealing from her purse or breaking something. Even when he hadn’t done it—even when Tessa was the guilty one—he took the brunt of it. They were always yelling at him or arguing about him.
He’s too damaged
, she’d heard their mother crying behind their parents’ closed bedroom door at night.
Something’s wrong with him. I can’t control him. He’s a ticking time bomb
.

“Please, Tessa, go on,” Dr. Capello said in that soothing voice that always tried to get Tessa to say more than she wanted. “I’d like to hear the rest.”

Tessa opened her eyes and focused on the shrink. She couldn’t look at Katie yet.

“Okay,” she said, and swallowed again. She knew what had happened that night. She could recite every detail. She’d gone over it a thousand times in her head. “I started over to the headmaster’s house but I chickened out. I couldn’t do it. I tried to pretend nothing had happened. I didn’t want to believe he’d really done it, until they found her in the woods. I thought he was too drunk that night to know what he was saying.”

“Have I got this right?” Katie said, and began ticking off points on her fingers. “Mark killed Rose, then called you for help. And when you didn’t show, he cut off her hand, dropped it off for me at Amelia House, and buried her in the woods. Did I leave anything out? Like maybe you ran into aliens or morphed into a werewolf?”

“Don’t do that,” Tessa said, hating the way Katie stared at her with such disappointment, as though she didn’t like her, much less trust her. “I don’t know why Mark did what he did. I’m not a shrink. But all those things happened, whether or not you want to believe me.”

Katie’s eyes turned bright with tears. “Then why didn’t you say something before now? Why did you wait so long? It doesn’t make sense, Tessa. None of this makes sense.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you!” Tessa cried out, wondering why Katie couldn’t see that by now. It was so obvious. “All
I’ve been trying to do is look out for you! Since the day we met, that’s all I’ve done.”

“Look out for me? Is that what you call what you’ve been doing?” Katie’s voice shook. “I think you want to scare me, Tessa. Things haven’t been right since I started seeing Mark. That’s when I started having the bad dreams. That’s when I started feeling like someone was watching me. When maybe it was you all along.”

“No.”

“So you didn’t sneak into the library stacks and set a rose on my bag during midterms?”

“No,” Tessa said.

“How do I know you’re not standing over me while I sleep, saying my name?” Katie went on, like she didn’t believe her. “Did you watch me while I slept last night? Did you have a rose in the room? I found a petal—”

“No!” Tessa bristled.

“I saw your pale hair, I saw your pale skin.” Tears began to skid down Katie’s cheeks. “It was you, Tessa. Who else could it have been?”

“It wasn’t me!” Tessa clenched her hands into fists.

Katie brushed at her cheeks and said nothing.

Tessa could hardly breathe.

“Ladies, let’s take this down a notch, okay?” Dr. Capello interjected. She got up from her desk and put a hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “It’s been a very tense couple of weeks,” she said. “Sometimes it’s easy for people to confuse reality and subconscious desires when they’re under a lot of stress—”

“I’m not confused,” Tessa said, pulling away from her. “Everything I told you did happen.”

“Give me your phone,” Katie said through her tears, holding out her hand. “If Mark called you that Saturday night, his number will show up.”

Tessa shook her head. “He didn’t use his own phone,” she said. “The number came up anonymous, like those disposable phones you buy at Walmart. I think it was the dead girl’s.”

“Do you see what I mean?” Katie turned to Dr. Capello. “She’s making this up! When it comes to Mark, she’ll say anything.”

“If the police have found Rose Tatum’s phone, they’ll know if a call was placed to Tessa,” the school shrink said, like she was the voice of reason. “They’ll check it for evidence.”

Tessa rubbed damp palms on her skirt.

“But can anyone prove that it was Mark who called her?” Katie asked. “What if it was someone else?”

“Who else do you think it was?” Tessa asked. “Rose was already dead.”

“Why are you doing this, Tessa?” Katie asked, the tears coming faster now. She wiped her sleeve against her nose. “Are you trying to make things even worse?”

“No.” Tessa shook her head. “I’m trying to make them better.”

“Better for you?” Katie murmured. “This is so messed up—
you’re
messed up.” Then she snatched her book bag and ran out of the room. The door slammed, and she was gone.

Tessa shut her eyes, gritting her teeth as Dr. Capello rattled
on. “I have to call the headmaster,” she was saying, and picked up the phone, “and I’m sure you’ll have to tell your story to the police, too.…”

You’re messed up, messed up, messed up
.

Why couldn’t Katie just accept that Mark was no good for her? Then she could stop wasting time on someone who didn’t really love her and move on with her life.

“I really wish you’d let me help you,” Dr. Capello said, not for the first time.

Tessa sat there, still as stone. She didn’t need help from the shrink. The only other person she’d ever been able to truly count on besides herself was her brother. She wished Peter could swoop in and rescue her now. But Tessa knew she was on her own.

K
atie ran out of the building, not sure what to do next. Tessa’s sudden confession was beyond surreal, worse than any nightmare. How many times in the last four years had Katie turned to Tessa when something went wrong? And then she’d begun to count on Mark as much as Tessa, maybe more. But now Katie didn’t know who or what to believe. She felt completely lost. Where was she supposed to go when she wasn’t sure who to trust anymore?

Katie didn’t go far. She ended up on a bench across from the building, sitting in the shadow of a giant oak. Brushing tears from her cheeks, she watched students walk past and tried to remember how it felt when her only fear was an upcoming exam, not whether or not her best friend was a pathological liar and her boyfriend a murderer.

A campus cop car pulled up in front of the administration
offices. The chief of campus security got out from the driver’s side just before Dr. Capello emerged from the building, escorting Tessa down the steps.

Katie got up and stood beneath the shade of the tree, staring as Tessa climbed into the car. The security chief exchanged a few words with Dr. Capello before he got behind the wheel and drove off. The school shrink lingered a moment before she turned and headed toward the faculty parking lot.

Instinctively, Katie grabbed her bag and ran after her.

“Dr. Capello, wait up!” she called, reaching the lot just as the psychiatrist tossed a leather case onto the passenger seat of her Volvo.

Dr. Capello shut the door and straightened. “Katie?”

“I need to talk about Tessa. She’s seriously messed up.”

“I know you’re concerned,” Dr. Capello said as she rounded the car to the driver’s-side door. “But we have to let the police take over from here. It’s out of my hands. If Tessa’s making things up, they’ll figure it out.”

“It’s not just that. There are so many things I can’t explain.” Katie knew something wasn’t right with Tessa. And it went beyond Rose and The Box and resenting Mark. “I get the feeling it has to do with the fire.”

Dr. Capello frowned and checked her watch. “I wish I could help you, but I’ve got appointments in town. I’m already late.…”

“Great,” Katie said, feeling butterflies in her stomach at what she was about to do. But she couldn’t just stand around doing nothing. “Let’s go,” she said, and opened the passenger
door. She set Dr. Capello’s briefcase on the floor with her book bag.

“Um, Katie?” The psychiatrist peered over the hood. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going with you,” she said, because it was the only way. “I have to find someone who was there the night Tessa’s house burned. Someone like Virginia Cottingham,” she said, remembering the name of the neighbor from the article in the
Barnard Gazette
that she’d read on Tessa’s MacBook. “So if you’d drop me off at Mayfield Avenue, that’d be perfect.”

“No,” Dr. Capello told her.

“What? Oh, sorry.” Katie cleared her throat. “Will you drop me off at Mayfield Avenue,
please
,” she said, then got into the car and pulled on the seat belt with a click.

Dr. Capello slid in behind the wheel but didn’t close the door. The car made a soft dinging noise as she spoke. “Being polite isn’t the problem. I can’t take you into Barnard without clearance from your mom or the headmaster.”

“Oh.”

Katie speed-dialed her mom and prayed she’d pick up. “Hey, yeah, it’s me,” she said, relieved when she heard the worried voice at the other end. “I’m all right, I swear. I just need you to give Dr. Capello permission to take me into Barnard for a bit. I have something pretty important to do. It shouldn’t take long.”

She pushed her phone toward Dr. Capello and couldn’t help but smile the littlest bit. “As long as I’ve got a responsible adult along, my mom’s cool with it. And I’d say you’re
responsible enough.” When the psychiatrist hesitated, Katie asked, “You want to speak to her privately? Or would you like to hear her say yes on speaker?”

Dr. Capello gave Katie a look before taking the phone and speaking briefly to her mother. When she was done she stabbed the key in the ignition. “Okay,” she said, shaking her head a bit as if to say,
You’d better not make me regret this
.

When they got to Mayfield Avenue, Dr. Capello’s Volvo crept up to the address where Tessa had once lived. Katie half expected to see the blackened shell of a house from the online photo. Instead, there was a quaint-looking Victorian sitting behind a white picket fence. Someone had rebuilt on the spot. Katie wondered who’d want to put up a house on soil where three people had tragically died.

“It’s been ten years. Even when something horrible happens, life goes on,” the psychiatrist said, clearly knowing where Katie’s thoughts had gone.

The mailbox on the house next door had faded white letters that spelled out
COTTINGHAM
, which made things all too easy.

“This is it,” Katie said, and the Volvo came to a stop.

Before Dr. Capello dropped Katie off, the shrink made her swear she’d call as soon as she was finished. She had to promise, too, that she wouldn’t go anywhere else on her own. “If anything happened to you …,” Dr. Capello said, but Katie assured her, “It won’t.”

The Volvo idled at the curb as Katie walked to the front door and rang the bell.
What if no one’s home?
she worried for a moment until she heard the lock turn.

A heavyset older woman answered. “Yes?” she said. Her white hair was close-cropped, her eyes thick-lidded. “Can I help you?”

“Are you Virginia Cottingham?”

“Oh, hon, if you’re here to sell candy or cookies to raise money for your glee club or band, I can’t do it. I’ve got diabetes, and I have to watch my weight.” She patted her belly, which stretched her knit top so that the zigzag pattern looked like stripes.

“I’m not selling anything,” Katie told her. “I’d like to ask you some questions about a girl who used to live next door. Tessa Lupinski.”

The woman’s baggy eyes narrowed. “The child who survived the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Is she in trouble? It wouldn’t surprise me if she was,” the woman murmured. “Those kids were both odd ducks.”

“She’s not in trouble exactly, she’s”—
talking crazy, trying to get my boyfriend locked up
, Katie wasn’t sure what to say—“my roommate at Whitney Prep, and I’m very worried about her.”

Mrs. Cottingham’s face closed off for a minute, and Katie thought she was going to shut the door. But instead, she opened it wider. “If we’re going to talk you might as well come in.”

Katie turned and waved to the Volvo before it finally took off. “My ride,” she explained. “She’ll be back to pick me up.”