Defensive Wounds (31 page)

“Already had one foot out the door but stuck around for another year after Jenna was murdered. More for the boys than for me, but I'm grateful to him for that. Once they headed for college, though, that was all she wrote. He packed his bags and never came back, and honestly, I'm grateful to him for that, too. If I had to hear one more word about acceptance, about moving on, I think I'd have—My daughter died seventy years too soon, died bewildered and screaming. How am I supposed to
accept
that?”

“I'm so sorry,” Theresa said, acutely aware of the inadequacy of those words.

“So where does your daughter work?” Coral Simone repeated. Then she sneezed again and saved Theresa from answering. “I'm sorry. Do you have a cat?”

“Um … yes.”

Coral Simone wiped her nose. “I'm allergic. Did you follow the trial at all?”

“What happened at the trial? Why was he found not guilty?”

“How did he get off, you mean?” Coral stood and refilled their cups, as if this might be a long tale. “Two things. The murder weapon and that bitch lawyer of his.”

“Marie Corrigan.”

“Yes. The one who was just killed at that hotel downtown. Don't ask me to shed any tears for
her
.” The woman smiled in a way that made the hair on Theresa's arms stand up, though in Coral's shoes she would have felt exactly the same way—and that
really
gave her the creeps.

“She got murdered, too,” the woman went on. “The coincidence of that just blew me away, but then I thought, she surrounds herself with murderers, so it's really not so surprising, is it? Anyway, first she got him tried as a juvenile and not an adult. Then she went on and on about the murder weapon, how he'd passed out so he couldn't have gotten rid of it, and if he could have, then he also could have cleaned up the scene or called his parents for help—the same parents who spent every penny they had either bribing or suing the papers, the TV, the national channels, even the school to keep their son's name out of the public eye.”

Theresa interrupted this rant to ask, “What do you think happened to the weapon?”

Coral Simone sneezed again and wiped her eyes. “The cops did look for it. Have you seen the house? It's on a corner lot, and there's a little bit of woods behind it, running up the street. They searched the entire area with a metal detector and even dogs. She harped on that, too, that if the police looked so thoroughly and couldn't find it, it was well and truly gone, and he couldn't have done it because he was passed out. And if he wasn't passed out and hid the murder weapon, why not hide Jenna's body? Maybe he had an accomplice,” Coral went on. “The cops questioned all his friends, and I questioned all Jenna's friends about his friends until their parents told me to stop calling. Women I'd known for years, and they hung up on me. They still have
their
daughters … Anyway, they never found any accomplice. I thought he could have buried it along a pipe or by an electrical cable, someplace where a metal detector would already go off and be disregarded. He could have wedged it inside his car frame somehow. I don't really know. Or, I thought, maybe he never used a fireplace poker at all. Maybe he used something that looked like it, then cleaned it and hid it in plain sight around the house. There's an endless list of places to hide something in a house, believe me. My oldest smoked for a while, and I'm still finding packs of cigarettes he forgot about. Would you like to see her room?”

“Um … yes.”

Coral stood up, and Theresa used the opportunity to take her cup to the sink, acting the polite and helpful guest while she checked out the windowsill. Next to Coral's trophy sat a good-size bottle of alprazolam with her name on it. Not too surprising.
If someone had murdered my daughter,
Theresa thought,
I'd need some Xanax to sleep, too.

Theresa followed Coral upstairs into a TV version of a teenage girl's room. White-and-pastel quilt on the bed, pale blue walls, white furniture with photos tucked into the corners of the mirror and necklaces strung on the bedposts. A small shelf held more sports trophies and medals. Schoolbooks still sat on the end table, and a video-game controller snaked out from a little television on the bookshelf. An aluminum bat stood in the corner, handle end up, a pair of batting gloves propped over them. The wooden furniture gleamed as if it had just been polished that morning.

Coral folded herself into a white wicker armchair as Theresa slowly circled the room, coming to a stop in front of the vanity table. She studied the photos. Jenna had been slender, with straight blond hair past her shoulders. Every teenage boy's dream.

“You keep this room so clean,” Theresa said, meaning,
You've turned it not only into a shrine, but an obsessively well-kept shrine.

“Dust bothers me,” Coral Simone said simply. “And my evenings are free.”

“Where do you work?”

“Parry Engineering. I'm a data programmer, mostly low coercivity. It's decent pay, flexible hours. Which is why I have this morning off.”

In most of the photos Jenna appeared with other girls, but here and there a boy cropped up. There were none of William. “Was Jenna dating anyone when she died?”

“Not steadily. She had broken up with a boy about a month before that, but they hadn't dated very long. That seems to be different about this generation. When I was young, I felt like a complete loser if I didn't have a steady boyfriend. Girls now don't seem to care so much about that. I guess it's an improvement.”

Theresa picked up a heart-shaped piece of wood about the size and thickness of her palm. It had Jenna's name burned into it, along with a few other decorative curlicues, and held down a shopping list Jenna had scribbled on a Hello Kitty notepad:
“tampons, underwear, mascara (coupon!),”
and something that looked like
“paint.”

“Her chem-lab partner made her that,” Coral said. “I should clarify about dating—she always had boys asking her
out
. But she didn't go unless she really felt interested. She wouldn't let a boy spend time or money on her just for her to have something to do. My boys … well, they have their father's attitude toward fairness, but to Jenna, justice meant something.”

Theresa looked at her, sensing a not-too-subtle point in the making.

“And then it failed her so badly,” Coral finished.

Theresa glanced over the bookcase—romance novels, crime dramas, two shelves of movies from Disney to horror, and more framed photographs, most with younger versions of Jenna and her brothers, her parents, her team. “Was it just the missing murder weapon that caused the jury to acquit?”

“Him.” Coral still refrained from speaking the boy's name, only that venomous pronoun. “That woman put him on the stand, and the prosecution couldn't shake him. He answered every question with ‘I don't remember,' pretending to look sad, on and on until the jury began to feel sorry for him. My daughter is
dead,
but she's away and out of sight and he's
there,
see? They brought in every girl in their class, all these sweet young girls who said he was such a nice cub and would never hurt anyone. Even Jenna's
friends
didn't believe he could have done it—another reason they stopped talking to me.”

“He didn't give any sort of explanation at all?”

“
She
did.” Apparently Marie Corrigan could not be named within the Simone household either. “She took just what I was talking about—how Jenna didn't have a steady boyfriend but boys would ask her out all the time. She tracked down every boy Jenna had dated since grade school and called them to the stand. Nice boys who were only trying to
help,
who said how much they liked Jenna. When she ran out of them, she called in boys who had
wanted
to go out with Jenna.”

“Why?”

“To turn my daughter into some sort of fatal attraction. She stood there with that fake sad expression, as if commiserating with their loss, but then twisted their words, reminding the jury how ‘popular' Jenna was—by which she meant ‘loose,' anyone could see that—as if Jenna toyed with every boy in three counties and tossed them aside like candy wrappers.”

“Phantom suspects.”

“Exactly. She invented this jealous beau who followed Jenna to that house, killed her, and left.”

“The bushy-haired stranger.”

Coral paused. “What?”

“An industry term, named after Sam Sheppard's phantom assailant. It's a standard defense strategy: Some other dude did it.”

Another boy, pursuing Jenna, sees her leave with William and follows. Two intoxicated teenagers probably didn't lock the front door behind them, so he goes in, and—It sounded ridiculous, but within the realm of possibility. Teenage hormones ran pretty strong, and it would explain the missing murder weapon. “There were no injuries to William?”

“Not a scratch.”

“Was he really that drunk? Or … incapacitated?”

Coral gave her a grim smile. “Impossible to tell. The estate lawyer arrived about the same time as the police did. He didn't give a statement or any body samples for over forty-eight hours.”

Theresa nodded. “By which time everything could have metabolized. And they never came up with this mysterious jealous suitor.”

Coral snorted, which turned into a sneeze. “Of course not. He didn't exist. No, he fooled everyone. He fooled Jenna. He will fool your daughter.” She fixed Theresa with a stare. “You have to get her away from him.
Now.
This instant.”

“I couldn't agree more.”

“Where does she work? Where is he?”

“What would you do if I told you?” Theresa asked, as gently as possible, mincing her way across this minefield.

An unholy smirk lifted a corner of the woman's mouth, but it looked more like a snarl. “What do you think I'm going to do, sneak up behind him and blow his head off? Believe me, I dream of that every night. Unfortunately, I don't own a gun, and if I did, I would have done it as he walked out of that courthouse. No, I just want to monitor him, as I said.”

Theresa leaned against the bedpost. “I'm so sorry, Coral. But if you go to my daughter's workplace and tell them about William, she'll never forgive me. Give me some time to fix this—at least let me get her out of the way first. If he's pushed, I don't know what he'll do, and I don't want her to be in the middle of it when he does.”

“You need to tell me where he is.”

“I will. As soon as I convince my daughter to get away from him—and stay away. Then I'll tell you.”

Coral's gaze never wavered. “You promise?”

It took a few seconds, but Theresa said, “I promise.”

Coral was a fellow mother, a grieving mother, a woman who'd had more tragedy in the past few years than most people had in a few lifetimes. So why did Theresa feel as if she'd just made a pact with the devil?

Coral gave a casual and unconvincing shrug. “I can't do anything anyway. I can't even inform his employer of his criminal record, legally, since it was a juvenile case and sealed. I just want to tell him that someone's paying attention to what he's doing. I want him to know I'm going to dog him until the end of my days.”

“You don't think that might be dangerous?”

“The concept of danger only applies to people who have something to lose,” Coral said.

The doorbell rang, startling them both.

Her host exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh. They're here already.”

“Who is?”

But Coral Simone rushed into the hallway and flew down the stairs with swift, sure feet. “And I'm not even dressed yet.”

Theresa followed, to watch from a careful distance at the bottom of the stairs as the door was flung open to reveal three other ladies: a younger woman of about thirty with an athlete's body and a
HANG TEN SURF SHOP
T-shirt; a birdlike, gray-haired one in a yellow turtleneck; and a tall, African-American matron whose face and body were all jutting angles underneath a widow's peak. She carried a plate of muffins that smelled delectable, and she wore a brooch made out of magnetic poetry squares. They were, as Theresa learned from the flurry of conversation and explanations, there for a support-group meeting, but they had plenty of time, dear, don't worry. Each one seemed sweet and caring.

“This is Theresa,” Coral said with one foot on the steps, unbuttoning her jersey cardigan to reveal a pink T-shirt.

“Is she joining the group?” the younger one asked, showing no enthusiasm for the idea of a new member.

“Not yet,” Coral said.

Theresa asked, “Group?”

“Families of Murder Victims,” Coral explained.

Not
yet
?

Theresa returned to her car, late for work, sucking in the fresh spring air and thanking God that her own daughter was home asleep and temporarily safe, praying that she would never have need of a support group. Any kind of support group, but especially that one.

However.