Waking Hours (19 page)

“If he was in heaven?”

“I guess. She told me she didn’t know where he was or if he was alive or dead, but if he wasn’t on the other side, then she’d know he was still alive. He left when she was really little.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Before we drank the punch.”

“How did she seem at the party?” Dani asked.

“Happy. Really optimistic.”

“And you can’t think of anybody who might have wanted to hurt her?”

“Logan didn’t think much of her,” Blair said. “He said she was a slut. But he’s an idiot.”

“Rayne and Khetzel thought you had a crush on him.”

“They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Is that why you’re mad at them?”

“I’m not mad at them. I’m just sad. When I get sad, I just want people to leave me alone.”

“What about Amos? What can you tell me about him?”

“I didn’t know why he was there,” Blair said. “I’d never seen him before. He just sat there and didn’t say anything. Like he was just there to watch. I tried to make conversation because I try to be nice to everybody, but he didn’t say anything so I left him alone.”

“Maybe he was already high on something?”

“Maybe.”

“So you were mostly hanging out with Liam at the party?”

“Liam is a friend,” Blair said, her posture straightening in defiance.

“With benefits?” Dani said.

“No,” Blair said. “He’s a
friend
. We talk. He’s really smart. We just talk. He’s actually really shy around girls.”

“Thank you, Blair,” Dani said. She turned to Casey, who leaned closer to the girl.

“I don’t have too much to add,” he told Blair. “What do you think happened? I know you can’t remember, but you must have been thinking about it. Who do you think could have killed Julie Leonard?”

“If I had to guess,” she said, “Logan Gansevoort.”

“Why Logan?”

“Because he’s evil,” Blair said. “In my opinion.”

“She totally had a crush on Logan,” Tommy, in the other room, said to Stuart. “That’s what girls say when boys won’t call them back.”

Stuart nodded in agreement.

The interview was over. Tommy watched the monitor as Casey, Dani, Blair, and her attorney all rose from where they were sitting.

“Why doesn’t Casey ask them how their blood ended up on Julie’s body?” Tommy said.

“Not this round,” Stuart said. “So far, it sounds like none of them is even aware of it. We’ll know more after we talk to Logan and Amos. I gotta walk her down to the lobby. Look busy.”

Dani and Casey reentered the bedroom. Tommy waited while they spoke about what was on the schedule for tomorrow. Finally she smiled at him.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said. She looked exhausted.

“Where do you want to get coffee?”

“Coffee?” Dani said, looking around. “How about over there?”

She pointed to the table by the windows where Tommy saw a large coffeemaker, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a box of Dunkin Donuts.

“I’m too tired to go anywhere,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I need to go to the ladies’ room and splash water on my face. But help yourself. I’ll be right with you.”

Tommy crossed to the table, where Detective Casey had staked out the half-dozen remaining Munchkins and begun to refuel.

“Is it true what they say about cops and donuts?” Tommy asked him, eyeing the gut protruding from between the panels of the detective’s unbuttoned sport coat.

“Is what true?” Casey replied with a straight face while stuffing a powdered sugar Munchkin into his mouth and licking his fingers.

Tommy was fairly certain Casey was joking with him. He just wasn’t certain enough.

“Never mind,” he said.

Dani came back and set up her laptop on the desk, telling Tommy she wanted to show him something. She logged onto the East Salem High Web site, where she opened the link to the previous year’s online yearbook.

She clicked to a photograph of Logan, then another, and another. In several of the pictures Liam was standing next to him. The two boys were obviously friends.

“And you’re showing me this . . . why?” Tommy asked.

“He reminds me of you,” Dani said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“I just mean he’s a jock,” Dani said. “You know more about jocks than I do.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Could you talk to Liam again and ask him about Logan?” she said. “We’re looking for someone who has sway over the others.”

She turned her computer so Tommy could better see the screen and brought up a different photograph, a jpeg of a boy and a girl. The girl was Julie Leonard. The boy was no one Tommy recognized.

“We got this off Liam’s cell phone. That doesn’t mean Liam took it, but we think it might be from the party. This has to be Amos. Which also makes it the last image we have of Julie alive.”

In the photograph, Julie was looking at Amos, but Amos was looking at the camera. Tommy didn’t know why, but just from the photograph, he took a disliking to the boy. Maybe it was the kid’s posture, or his expression, or the way he was ignoring the girl he was supposed to have been with.

“Speaking of witnesses, I talked to Crazy George,” Tommy told her. “He wasn’t terribly helpful, but I got the impression his mother had escaped the nursing home before.”

“You talked to George Gardener?” Dani said. “Tommy—you’re not supposed to be interrogating witnesses before the police can talk to them. Do I have to explain that?”

“I ran into him at the hardware store,” Tommy said. “We were talking about chickens.”

“Chickens?”

“It’s a long story,” Tommy said. “Actually, it’s a short story, but it’s beside the point. So what are you thinking, now that you’ve talked to everybody?”

“Almost everybody,” Dani reminded him. “As far as guilt, I couldn’t say. But something happened that changed these kids. They don’t remember what it is, and I can’t explain why they don’t, but I think it’s in there. Hypnosis might help, but they’d have to volunteer. You can’t hypnotize someone against their will.” She began packing up and put her laptop into her briefcase.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Tommy said, and held out his hand toward her second bag, filled with books and folders. “That looks heavy—may I?”

Dani seemed surprised.

“I didn’t get a chance to work out today,” he said.

She handed him the bag, slung her purse over her shoulder, and took a firm grip on her briefcase. “Thanks,” she told him.

Tommy almost made it out of the lobby of the inn without being recognized, but then he heard someone call out his name. His policy was always to sign autographs except when the person seeking it was a professional collector who turned around and sold his autographs on eBay. “Just a second,” he said to Dani.

“Tommy Gunderson,” Vivian Ross sang, throwing her arms out dramatically and hugging him, air kissing him on each cheek. She beamed at him. “How
are
you? They told me you were here. Do you remember when we met on the red carpet in Los Angeles? I believe you were escorting one of Hollywood’s latest young . . . things.” She lingered on the word
things
. “Not poor Cassandra—the one after that. I love your bag.”

“Hi, Vivian,” Tommy said. “It’s not mine. Good to see you again.”

“Listen, Thomas, dear—could I have a word with you?” She hooked her arm around his and pulled him aside. Tommy wondered how it was some Americans ended up with British accents, like Orson Welles, or William F. Buckley, or Vivian Ross.

“I was hoping,” she said, lowering her voice to a range somewhere between confidential and top secret, “if you could do me a big huge favor and tell me what went on up there? Apparently my daughter had the boneheaded idea to dismiss her lawyer, and she won’t tell me a thing. I swear, Thomas, if there was the world’s most complicated way to peel an orange, that girl would find a way to make it even harder and wait for a bad day to do it.”

“I can’t tell you, Vivian,” Tommy said. “Even if I wanted to. I got here after they’d finished.”

“Well, who can, then?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I believe the conversation was private.”

The actress dropped all pretense of cordiality. “Nice to see you again,” she said, giving him the most theatrically insincere smile he’d ever seen.

Tommy waited in the parking lot while Dani scrounged in her handbag, searching for her car keys. He thought to offer her the use of his metal detector, but he’d left it at home.

“Have you ever heard of a passage party?” she asked him. “Liam never mentioned anything, did he?”

“He didn’t,” Tommy said. “What’s a passage party?”

Dani told him what she knew.

“It sounds crazy-dangerous. Liam’s not a big risk taker.”

“This is going to sound naïve,” Dani told him, “but sometimes, even after all the work I’ve done with juveniles, I still don’t understand why they want to get high. I never did. I think I had one sip of crème de menthe at a slumber party in eighth grade and I felt like I’d swallowed toothpaste. I wanted to throw up.”

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” Tommy said. “Your one sip is one more than I’ve ever had.”

“Seriously?” Dani said.

“You sound surprised,” Tommy said.

“I am,” she said. “I could have sworn I saw a picture of you with a bottle of something in your hand.”

“If you did,” he said, “it would have been champagne when we won the Super Bowl. But I was squirting it down my friend’s pants, not drinking it.”

“I guess the tabloids tried to make you out to be a party lizard,” she said.

“The tabloids say a lot of things,” Tommy said. “If you try to correct them, it only makes it worse.”

“You never drank even in high school?”

Tommy shook his head. “I just always knew what I wanted,” he said as she found her keys and unlocked the car. “Drinking or doing drugs wasn’t going to help me get to where I wanted to go. It seemed obvious. If you want a healthy body, don’t put stuff in it that’s bad for you. I don’t even like to take Tylenol.”

“Kids give in to peer pressure,” Dani said.

“I guess. Depends on who you consider your peers. Do you think it’s strong enough to make somebody kill someone?”

“Excellent question. I’ve been asking myself that. I worked with a juvenile once who wanted to join a gang. They told him that as an initiation he had to shoot a homeless person. And he did. There were other factors, but that was peer pressure.” She sighed. “I feel like I could sleep for three days straight. But I’ll settle for three hours. Do you ever have trouble sleeping?”

“Only when the burglar alarm goes off,” Tommy said. “Or if my dad’s having problems. I actually have a baby monitor in his room. How’s that for irony?”

“You’re a good son,” she said.

“Did you know that the animal that has the most dreams is the platypus?” he told her.

“How do you know that?”

“How do you
not
know that?” he said. “It’s common knowledge. I read it somewhere.”

“What do platypuses dream of?”

“Probably about being anything other than a platypus.” He’d also read somewhere that trying to impress a girl with random facts was something only morons did.

Then he saw a flash of light reflecting off a telescopic lens. “Get down!”

He grabbed Dani by the shoulders and spun her around, shielding her with his body. She heard automobile tires screeching and broke free of his embrace in time to see a black sports car speed away.

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “Paparazzi. Using a 1200 millimeter telephoto lens. I used to see a lot of those. Prepare to see your picture in the papers tomorrow.”

“Why would they want a picture of me?”

“No offense, but they don’t,” he said. “You’ll probably be described as the mystery woman on the arm of ex-footballer Tommy Gunderson. Sorry about that. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be.”