Ecstasy (12 page)

A source told Ochoa it might be some chemical that’s used in the manufacturing process, but frankly nobody seemed too obsessed
with the particulars. The important thing was that the powers that be knew what kind of drug the kids had taken, and therefore
what drug they had to warn the rest of the world about.

The story had hit the airwaves on Monday, three apparently being the magic number of corpses that merited the attention of
CNN and its ilk. The
Times
put the story on page three of the Metro section, the dead reduced to a list of names and ages within Gordon’s larger story
about the potential dangers of a batch of killer acid.

“Nobody brews up just three doses of LSD,” one talking head from the CDC was quoted as saying. “We know there’s more out there,
probably a great deal more. We need to get the word out about how dangerous this is before more people lose their lives.”

The investigation into where the drugs had come from was, by all accounts, going nowhere. It didn’t help that the Jaspersburg
cops, being in a mighty rush to get everybody off the festival grounds, hadn’t gotten names and contact numbers from any of
them. Neither did the Melting Rock management offer much help in figuring out who’d shown up. The festival doesn’t take credit
cards, and although people can send in checks for five-day passes, the volunteers don’t keep records after they fill the orders.
The closest thing to an attendance roster that organizers could come up with was a list of the people who’d reserved campsites—without
phone numbers, hometowns, or (in some cases) first names.

So finding people for the cops to talk to was no easy task; it was also a job that the Jaspersburg police seemed determined
to do by itself. Although a few Walden County sheriff ’s deputies had been recruited to help track down campers, offers of
advice or manpower from the G.P.D. had been rebuffed, though politely. The word on the street was that Chief Stilwell was
taking the case personally—very personally. Three of his daughter’s friends had died, and he was damn well going to find out
who’d sold them the drugs that’d killed them.

I heard a lot of this from Ochoa, who was enjoying the typical cops reporter’s unseemly glee at the prospect of covering something
more serious than jaywalking. But I also got some of the details from Lauren, who kept wanting to talk—but, to Ochoa’s eternal
vexation, seemed willing to speak only to me.

She dropped by the paper four days after Tom’s funeral, arms laden with the booty of a back-to-school shopping trip, and every
male eye in the newsroom looked up from their computer screens to check her out. She was wearing a dark blue Indian-print
sundress, the kind you can buy in half a dozen stores on the Green and whose thin straps, sadly for yours truly, do not permit
the wearing of a brassiere. Her long hair was swept up in a chunky bun, fastened with two black lacquer sticks that formed
an X at the base of her skull. She wasn’t wearing a molecule of makeup, and she didn’t need to.

“Lauren, this is our science writer, Jake Madison,” I said, because I had no choice; Mad was standing there with his hand
extended and a shit-eating grin on his face. “Jake Madison, Lauren Potter. Lauren”—I cleared my throat for emphasis—“is a
student at Jaspersburg
High School.
”

“Nice,” Mad said. “What year?”

“I’m a senior,” she said. She hadn’t let go of his hand—but then again, he didn’t seem particularly inclined to let go of
hers.

“Nice,” he said again. “So you must be… what? Eighteen?”

“In a couple weeks.”

“Interesting.”

I picked up my backpack. “Lauren and I were just going out for coffee.” I’d offered to take her for frozen yogurt—my second
of the day—but she’d turned up her nose at it in favor of an espresso. “So, okay, let’s go.”

Neither one of them moved, though they did have the decency to stop shaking hands. “You want to come with us?” Lauren asked
him. I narrowed my eyes at him in an attempt to say
don’t you dare.

“I’d love to,” he said. My eyes reduced to slits. “But I’ve got an interview on campus in twenty minutes. Gotta go.”

Now, don’t get the idea that Mad was trying to behave like a decent person; I’d been at the edit meeting, and I knew he actually
did have an interview.

“Maybe some other time,” Lauren said, favoring him with her very expensive smile.

“Sounds great,” Mad said, and I got her out of the newsroom before he could say anything else.

We went over to Café Whatever, the Green’s newest purveyor of caffeine and overpriced cookies. She ordered a double espresso
with a twist of lemon, whereas I went for a big latte with a shot of almond syrup. We settled at one of the tables, with Lauren’s
packages overflowing the adjacent chairs.

“So did you get everything you need for school?”

She surveyed the bags. “Huh? Oh, some.”

“You went shopping by yourself?”

She shrugged. “My mom was supposed to meet me, but she got stuck in the lab. Big surprise.”

“She’s at the Benson med school, right?”

She nodded. “My dad too. They’re, like, totally brilliant.”

“Are you going to go into medicine too?”

“Maybe. I’m pretty good at science stuff, chemistry and biology. Must be genetic.”

“So, Lauren…how come you came by the paper today?”

Another shrug. “You said I could.”

“You didn’t want to talk about anything in particular?”

She stirred three sugars into her espresso with a dainty little spoon. “Nah, I…I was just down here, so…”

She’s lonely,
I realized all of a sudden.
Despite being the alpha female of her social group, the kid’s just plain lonely.

“What are your friends up to—Trish and Dorrie and Cindy?”

She bit her lower lip. “Cindy’s…She hasn’t really seen anybody since… since what happened. Alan said he’s not even sure if
she’s gonna come back to school.”

“Really? What’s she going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe go someplace different. A private school maybe.”

“But Dorrie and Trish are doing okay?”

“I guess. Dorrie…Well, Dorrie’s just Dorrie. Mainly, she likes pissing off her parents with her hair and stuff.”

“Yeah, I heard that they’re—”

“Multigazillionaires? Yeah. And they’ve been taking her to Benson alumni stuff since she was born. Drives her nuts.”

“And Trish?”

“Trish? She kind of keeps to herself a lot. She doesn’t hang out as much as she used to.”

“Since the festival?”

“Since a while.”

“Have you, you know, been interviewed by the police yet?”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you
kidding?
They’ve come over, like, five times since the fest. My folks told me to tell them everything I know, but I can’t. I mean,
I don’t
know
anything. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“You really don’t know where the guys got their drugs?”

“I didn’t even know they had any.” I gave her a look that said I didn’t buy it, and she blushed into her demitasse. “Okay,
I mean …I knew they had some shit. We all did. But I didn’t know they had anything new.”

“Did you have any acid yourself?”

She shook her head with surprising vehemence. “Me? No way.”

“How come?”

“I had, you know…a bad trip a while ago. I don’t do that stuff anymore. Just pot and a little E and some ’shrooms once in
a while. That’s it.”

“Sounds like plenty.”

“Come on, you’re not going to get all judgmental on me, are you? I get enough of that from my mom and dad. I mean, it’s not
like they didn’t smoke dope when they were—”

“Jesus, Lauren, think about it. Three of your friends are dead. You can’t blame your parents for worrying about you. I’m surprised
they didn’t confiscate your stash.”

“Are you kidding? Of course they did. They made me hand over everything I had and they flushed it down the toilet.”

“Good for them.” She gave me a beleaguered look. “What about Dorrie and Trish?”

“What do you think I’m going to do, narc on them?”

“If it could save their lives, you bet your ass.”

Her demitasse stopped in midair. “You know,” she said, “you don’t sound like most grown-ups I know.”

“Yeah, well, the jury’s still out on how grown-up I am in the first place. So, do they have any acid or don’t they?”

“Nah. It was kind of a guy thing.”

“So does Alan?”

“He says…He told me Shaun offered to get him a tab, but he said no. And later he offered to split one with him, but Alan still
didn’t feel like it. I think…”

“What?”

“He won’t really talk about it, but I think it has him really freaked out—wondering whether maybe he would’ve died too, or
maybe if Shaun’s tab had been split in half, they both would’ve been okay, just maybe got a little sick or something.”

“And do you know where the guys got the stuff they took?”

“At Melting Rock? Could’ve been from a million people.”

“Well, who did they usually get their drugs from?”

“Different places. I don’t know.”

“Where do you get yours from?” She stared at the tabletop. “Come on, Lauren. Just tell me.”

“I don’t know if I should.”

“Why not?”

She extended an index finger and traced the shape of the question marks embedded in the glass tabletop. “Because.”

“Because why?” I was starting to feel like a twelve-year-old myself.

“Because …you’re not supposed to, you know, speak ill of the dead.”

“You got it from one of the boys?” She nodded. “Which one?”

“Shaun.”

“Shaun Kirtz? He was a dealer?”

“Oh, God, nothing like that. He just knew what to buy and where to get it.”

“And what about now?”

“I haven’t …Since it happened, I haven’t done anything.”

“Because your parents threw it all away?”

“That,” she said, “and because it just doesn’t seem like fun anymore.”

A
fter the first round of stories about the effort to track down the source of the drugs, things died down. There just wasn’t
that much to write about. Since no new cases had been reported, no other jurisdictions had gotten involved. And when a bunch
of drunken students got into a bloody brawl during a Freshman Week party at Bessler College—the tiny liberal-arts school that
languishes in Benson’s shadow—Melting Rock wasn’t even the most recent example of youthful self-destruction.

The deaths did continue to inspire a commotion from the Gabriel activist corps, which mounted an educational campaign warning
of the various dangers of LSD. But, like at the festival itself, those efforts varied widely, from “Just say no” to “Just
make sure your drugs are kosher.” I hadn’t realized it until then—mostly because I’d always been wildly uninterested in such
things—but apparently LSD still has quite a following. For some people, it’s a recreational matter, while for others it’s
positively messianic.

San Francisco is, naturally, known as the LSD capital of America. But there are still plenty of sixties holdovers in Gabriel,
some of whom (literally or figuratively) participated in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test all those decades ago. This may be
a small town, but it’s a pretty funky place.

And as far as I’m concerned, nothing demonstrated said funkiness quite as pointedly as the two informational tables that cropped
up on the Green after the three kids died. One was sponsored by the fire department and offered cautionary literature complete
with skull and crossbones; the other touted LSD as a potential cure for everything from alcoholism to criminality.

“You know,” one fellow from the latter table was telling me and my notebook, “acid’s gotten a way bad rap.”

The guy was around sixty, sporting a gray ponytail pulled together over a balding pate. His first and only name was Sandy,
which he said was short for “Sandman,” and though he was the only person sitting at the table, he wasn’t exactly alone. Standing
off to his left was Joe Kingman, a Gabriel alderman and Benson law professor who was there to protect Sandy’s right to free
speech. If the cops tried to get rid of him, he told me, he had an injunction request all ready to go.

Although Sandy was (unsurprisingly) doing a brisk business, he was more than happy to take time out to educate me. LSD’s ability
to treat various disorders had only begun to be explored in the sixties, he said. And although a number of bona fide doctors
and psychologists thought it had terrific potential to help humanity, he told me, “their work was quashed by a small-minded
government afraid to have its citizens fully aware of their mental and emotional power.” Then he gave me a copy of
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience
and a homemade granola bar, which he told me was, quote, “clean.”

I’d happened upon the tables on my way to lunch, which meant that when I returned to the newsroom I had both a gooey slice
of white pizza with broccoli and the makings for an equally tasty news story. I dispatched the two inside of twenty minutes,
thanking the journalism gods that I’d been coming back out of the Center Gabriel food court just as Sandy was calling his
counterpart at the other table a “pea-brained fascist drone.”

After lunch I had to turn my attention to something a lot less fun: the open house for Deep Lake Cooling.

What, you may ask, is Deep Lake Cooling?

Allow me to begin at the beginning.

Three years and $150 million in the making, Deep Lake (as we hipsters call it) is the largest single infrastructure project
in Benson University history. And though Mad is the science guy, I’ve covered the thing enough that I can give you the basics.

It all started when an attractive-but-hirsute Benson engineer named Glenn Shardik woke up in the middle of the night and realized
that the university was sitting right next to a honking-big body of water. And not only is Mohawk Lake long, it’s really deep—maybe
four hundred feet—so the water at the bottom stays something like 38 degrees all year round.

Now, although the subject of air-conditioning is not a particularly sexy one, apparently it’s rather important. Cooling the
campus costs big money, particularly when you’re talking about upgrading from all those nasty, ozone-killing CFCs. And although
the powers that be may be perfectly happy to let the undergrads swelter, the fact is that computers and labs need to be kept
comfy, or else.