Waking Hours (24 page)

From the Kasdens’ house it was a ten-minute drive to the Lake Kendell community, a cluster of small Craftsman homes and three-season cottages on the southern shore of the lake where Westchester County abutted Putnam County. This was East Salem’s response to the New York State Housing Reform Act, which required every town to develop a percentage of housing for low-income families. In the rest of East Salem, the minimum lot size was four acres. At Lake Kendell there was no minimum. Some cottages were built as little as ten feet apart. Some dwellings, on waterfront lots, were well-kept and afforded a pleasant if not luxurious lifestyle with boating and water-skiing and fishing opportunities. The houses farther back from the lake were less well kept and had gardens that needed weeding, siding in need of painting, rusted gutters, fences with missing slats.

The wealthy considered Lake Kendell an eyesore. Those who lived there considered it home, a place to drink beer on their porches and put pink plastic lawn flamingos in their gardens if they had a mind to.

The house where Julie Leonard had lived was at the end of Sunset Lane, set back from the lake without a view of either the lake or the setting sun, as best Dani could tell. It was painted a muted periwinkle blue with off-white trim. She saw three pumpkins at the end of the porch, uncarved, and a bird feeder hanging above the railing. There were home-crafted dream catchers and stained-glass sun catchers hanging inside the picture window. The brass door knocker was in the shape of a horse’s head, and Dani decided to give it a try.

Connie Leonard let them in and, after they’d introduced themselves, immediately offered them coffee. “I’m sorry about the mess,” she said, referring to the basket of unwashed clothes on the kitchen counter and the dishes in the sink. “I’m still not quite myself.”

Connie was in her forties, her thin light brown hair teased and brushed back. She was wearing a beige cardigan over a light blue cotton turtleneck and gray sweatpants, with sheepskin slippers on her feet. She wore no makeup and looked tired, defeated, spent.

“That’s all right,” Dani said. She noticed a framed portrait of a girl on the mantel and recognized the face and the signature as Julie’s. The portrait was neither self-flattering nor self-deprecating. It was honest, and it was good. The eyes were particularly well done and seemed to be looking straight at the viewer.

“That’s my Jules,” Connie said, noticing where Dani was looking.

“Pretty,” Dani said. “If this is a bad time . . .”

“No, no,” Connie said. “I mean, the last few days have been one nonstop bad time. I’m not sure I have anything more to say than what I already told the detectives.”

“The lead detective asked me to follow up,” Dani said, handing Connie her card.

Connie looked at it, gesturing for Dani and Tommy to sit in a pair of armchairs opposite the couch, where she then sat.

“I was wondering what you could tell us about Julie,” Dani began. “She sounds like a great kid.”

“She was the best,” Connie said. She sounded hoarse.

“Was she popular at school?”

“She had friends,” Connie said. “I imagine she could have wanted more. All kids want more friends. You know how kids are.”

“Enemies?” Dani asked.

Connie shook her head. “That’s the weirdest part. There’s just no . . . nothing logical about it. There’s just no reason anybody would want to do something like this. I can’t make any sense of it.”

Dani wondered if she’d ever heard a voice so lost.

“Maybe the police can make sense of it,” she said. “The kind of person who could do something like this doesn’t see the world the same way we do. We can’t understand it because we can’t see through their eyes.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Connie said, grabbing a fresh tissue and drying her eyes.

“Do you know if Julie was friends with Rayne Kepplinger or Khetzel Ross or Blair Weeks?” Dani said.

Connie grimaced.

“Were they ever over here to visit? Did she ever go to their houses?”

“They were never here,” Connie said, looking around sadly, staring at a spot on the rug before looking up. “Julie would have been too embarrassed to ask any of them over. But I know she was in the Kepplingers’ and the Weekses’ homes because I have service contracts with them. Julie started helping out after I had to let two of my girls go. I just couldn’t afford to pay them anymore. Since the recession.”

“Julie helped you clean the houses of her friends?” Dani asked.

“Kara too,” Connie said. “I know how that must have felt to her. She never complained. We tried to do it during hours when they weren’t home, but that wasn’t always possible. You know, the newspaper quoted me saying I think the rich kids are going to get away with murder, but I didn’t say that. I said if you’ve got money, you can do whatever you want, but I was half out of my mind. I’m sure they get special favors sometimes . . .” She let the thought go.

“Actually,” Tommy said, “it’s sort of the opposite. I know most of the East Salem cops, and they’re all townies. They pop the preppies every chance they get.”

Dani looked up when Julie’s sister, Kara, came down the stairs and sat on the couch next to her mother, hugging a decorative pillow to her chest. She was fourteen or fifteen, Dani guessed, wearing an oversized East Salem High sweatshirt. Dani wondered if it belonged to Julie. Where Connie seemed lost and forlorn, Kara looked angry.

“Is it all right if Kara joins us?” Connie said. “We’ve decided there aren’t ever going to be any secrets between us anymore.”

“Were there secrets between you and Julie?” Dani asked.

“I’m sure there were,” Connie said. “Girls always hide things. But nothing important. Smoking in the garage. Just normal stuff.”

“Did she ever talk about the supernatural?” Dani asked. “Was she into vampires like the rest of the kids are these days?”

Connie looked at Kara.

“She liked ’em,” Kara said. “But there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“What did she like about them?”

“She just liked how the people in the books were totally in love with each other spiritually but they could never consummate their love physically because one was a vampire and the other wasn’t,” Kara said. “She didn’t believe in vampires, but she believed you could love people who weren’t necessarily lovable.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?” Dani asked.

Connie again looked at Kara.

“I don’t know if you could call him a boyfriend,” Kara said, “but about a year ago she had a huge crush on one boy. I don’t know if they ever went out.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Liam Dorsett,” Kara said.

Dani looked at Tommy, who gave no indication that he knew anything about a relationship between Liam and the victim. She knew he would have said something if he’d known.

“She was upset because he dumped her,” Kara said. “Why? Is he involved in this?”

“Kara,” her mother said, “Dr. Harris is trying to help us. Please dial it down.”

“Had Julie ever sneaked out of the house before?” Dani asked.

Kara nodded.

“Do you know what she did or who she was with? Did she ever sneak out to see Liam Dorsett?”

Kara shook her head. “I think Julie was embarrassed,” she said. “I don’t know what he did to her. She wouldn’t talk about it.”

Dani asked questions to reconstruct Julie’s last night. Connie had fallen asleep on the couch. Someone had thrown a blanket over her, presumably Julie. The police found the clothes Julie had changed out of in the garage. She’d changed into a party dress.

“It sounds like she was really looking forward to the party at Logan’s house,” Dani said.

“You wouldn’t believe how excited she was,” Kara said. “She made me promise not to tell.”

“Did she know who was going to be there?”

“She mentioned some girls from school.”

“How did she get there?” Dani asked. “It’s pretty far from here. Did she have a car?”

“I think someone picked her up. I was asleep,” Kara said.

“Did you know what kind of party she was going to?” Dani asked.

Kara hesitated. Then she said, “It was a passage party. They’re—”

“I know what they are,” Dani said. “Did she know? Did she think she’d be safe?”

“It’s only dangerous if you don’t believe,” Kara said, taking her mother’s hand and squeezing it. “I told her not to go. I told her it was stupid. I was worried.”

“Why were you worried?” Dani asked.

“Because you’re not supposed to mess with stuff you don’t understand.”

“Do you mean the drugs?”

“Any of it,” Kara said. “But I never saw Julie drink anything. Or smoke pot. I swear.”

“Do you know why she went?”

Kara gave her mother an apologetic glance, then said, “She was hoping she could talk to our dad.”

Dani was aware that Tommy was resting his hand on the back of her chair, but now she felt him touch her reassuringly.

“We don’t know what happened to him,” Connie apologized. “Julie was convinced her father was dead, because otherwise she was sure he would have tried to find her. Kara thinks she just wanted to know for sure, one way or the other.”

“She tried to track him down online,” Kara said, again glancing at her mother. “We both did. We Googled him and used the different websites, but we never got a hit.”

As the conversation continued, Tommy asked if he could use the bathroom. While he was gone, Dani showed Kara the picture taken of Julie and Amos the night of the murder. Kara didn’t recognize Amos, but that didn’t mean anything. Julie sometimes chatted with people online, she said, or went to the Facebook pages of other people from school and fished their listed friends to invite kids to become her friend too.

Dani recalled what Casey had told her they’d learned after his team had gone over Julie’s laptop. Julie had eighty-seven Facebook friends. Only one kid from the party was on her friends list, Rayne Kepplinger, who had over three thousand friends. Most of the messages posted on Julie’s wall were prosaic exchanges like
I’m really worried about today’s test
, or
Does anybody know what pages we’re supposed to read tonight from Hamlet?
Only one seemed relevant to the crime, a brief exchange with Liam, almost a year old.

Julie Leonard: One question. Why?

Liam Dorsett: It just wasn’t going to work out
.

Casey had also discovered that Julie had deleted her browsing history. All her stored e-mails had been deleted as well, and her recycle bin was empty.

Dani asked Kara if clearing her caches was something Julie did on a regular basis. “Do you think she wanted to hide something?” Dani asked.

“She would have told me,” Kara said. “We talked about everything.”

“Can I ask you one last question? I hear a lot of anger in your voice. You said you didn’t want her to go to the party, that you were worried, and yet you also said you were asleep when she left. How was it that you fell asleep? If I’m worried about something, it keeps me awake.”

“She promised me she wasn’t going,” Kara said. “She lied to me . . .”

Now Kara’s anger gave way to tears. Her mother went to her and hugged her.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Dani said as she turned the car back onto the main road away from the lake.