Ecstasy (39 page)

My thoughts returned to the subject of making the drugs themselves. If what you needed was a laboratory to whip it up in,
Benson obviously had about a hundred of them. From what Ochoa had told me, you wouldn’t need a Ph.D. to pull it off—a working
knowledge of high-school chemistry would do it.

High-school chemistry.

I stopped in midwalk, prompting a dirty look from Shakespeare. But I just stood there and stared at the list, my brain running
a mile a minute.

I knew somebody who was good—
very
good—at high-school chemistry.

Somebody who was close to Dorrie.

Whose parents offered easy access to the Benson labs.

Who seemed way more upset at Tom Giamotti’s funeral than anyone else’s.

Who, in the days immediately following the killings, had stuck to me like glue.

Who’d slept with Axel and could have easily lured him to a rendezvous at Deep Lake.

Who’d recently flipped out at the mention of Dorrie being attacked.

Even someone who, theoretically speaking, was smart enough to find a way to scare the living hell out of a dolt like Rob Sturdivant.

I didn’t have a pen on me, but if I did, I would’ve scribbled down the following questions, again in no particular order:

• What if Tom never hurt anybody?
  
• What if the four tabs were meant for Shaun, Billy, Alan—and Axel?
  
• What if Axel messed up and sold them to Tom and Norma Jean?
  

And here was the big one:

• What if the “mastermind” behind all this was… an eighteen-year-old kid named Lauren Potter?
  

I
had to talk to Dorrie. There was just no other way. My entire theory—which, by the way, was seeming more far-fetched with
every mile of the Gabriel-Jaspersburg Road—was based on the assumption that the boys had assaulted her. If I was anywhere
near right about Lauren, there obviously wasn’t a lot of wisdom in interviewing her. And I had a feeling that Cindy and Trish,
who’d always seemed the most fragile members of the group, probably didn’t know what the hell was going on.

No, Dorrie had to be at the center of everything—didn’t she? But how could I get her to talk to me? My recent attempts to
get information out of people (Lauren, Sturdivant, Dorrie herself ) had been less than successful—unless your definition of
success involves getting slapped, yelled at, and summarily evicted. And although I’d previously thought of blackmailing Dorrie
by proving that she’d been the one to swipe the Deep Lake Cooling key for Axel, now that I was thinking of her as a victim,
I hardly had the stomach for it.

And to top it all off, I wasn’t even sure where to look for her. It was eight o’clock on a Thursday night, so I figured she’d
probably be home—but the idea of showing up on her parents’ doorstep didn’t seem very promising. Halfway to Jaspersburg, I
pulled over and called her house on my cell; her mother answered, and I tried very hard to sound like a high-school kid. I
said I needed to talk to Dorrie to get the math homework; she said she expected her home around nine. I crossed my fingers,
said a little prayer to whoever is the patron saint of liars, and told Mrs. Benson I really,
really
needed the assignment right away.

“She’s at the Mohawk Nature Center,” she said, sounding both patrician and annoyed. “She’s having a meeting for …some sort
of club, I believe.”

Score.
I thanked her profusely—probably way
too
profusely—and pulled back onto the road. The nature center, a hippie enclave that teaches kids how to spin their own yarn
and make tea out of tree bark, is on the far side of Jaspersburg. I’d been there plenty of times when I was on the schools
beat. I’d even covered a pagan wedding there once, where the bride and groom had worn nothing but robes made of cloth they’d
loomed themselves.

On the drive through Jaspersburg, another thought occurred to me: What if Dorrie and Lauren were in on it together? Wasn’t
that more likely than Lauren plotting the whole thing on her own?

The answer, it seemed to me, was yes. So should I turn the car around? Somehow, I didn’t think so; I still had to find out
if I was on the right track. And besides… for some reason, I couldn’t picture myself being actually
scared
of Dorrie—or, come to think of it, Lauren, either. Was that a pretty solid indication that I was off on some ridiculous head
trip?

I was still debating the question when I turned into the center. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot—including
Dorrie’s own red Beetle—but all the lights appeared to be out. As I went up to the front door, an outdoor safety light went
on. I could just make out the words on a handwritten sign taped to the window:

TRI
-
COUNTY EARTH DAY PLANNING COMMITTEE

7–8
TONITE

RACHEL CARSON LOUNGE

UPSTAIRS

I checked my watch; it was coming up on eight-thirty. I tried the door, but it was locked. The meeting must be over by now,
but Dorrie was obviously still here. Deciding to do a loop around the building, I grabbed my trusty Maglite out of the car.
I’d just made it over to the right side when I heard some talking and giggling maybe thirty yards off into the woods. Then
a voice said, “Shh! Somebody’s here!”—plenty loud enough for me to pinpoint where they were. I shone my flashlight in their
direction and saw a clutch of kids gathered on the ground; even from a distance, I could smell the pot smoke.

The minute I fixed them with the light, they scattered, amid the snapping of twigs and the crinkling of potato chip bags.
I had no idea which one might be Dorrie, so I did the only thing I could think of; I went back to wait in her car, which she’d
left unlocked. About fifteen minutes later, she plopped herself in the driver’s seat.

“Do you really think,” I said, “that you’re in any shape to get behind the wheel?”

“Jesus Christ,” she said, “you scared me.”

“Sorry.”

“What are
you
doing here, anyway?”

Her voice sounded odd—not slurred like a drunk, but… mellower, a little distracted, maybe vaguely amused.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said again. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“No.”

I let the word hang in the air for a while. Finally, she got uncomfortable enough to say something.

“Why not?” The words came out in a whine, which she directed to the steering wheel. “Why can’t you just leave me
alone?
Why do you have to keep
bugging
me?”

“Because I need to know what happened.”

“What happened
when?
”

“Last year. At Melting Rock.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, banging her head dramatically against the center of the steering wheel. Then she struggled to
pull a set of keys out of her pocket and stick them into the ignition. I grabbed the ring out of her hand.

“Hey,” she said. “What do you think you’re—”

“You’re in no shape to drive.”

She looked around the now-empty lot with a shrug. “My buds already left.”

“They’re not my concern at the moment. You are.”

She let out a beleaguered groan—the kind of sound a person is constitutionally incapable of uttering after age twenty-one—and
let her noggin fall back against the headrest.

“Would you please just leave me alone?” I flicked on the overhead light, and she shrank from the glare. “Jesus, what’d you
have to go do that for?”

She flicked it off again, but not before I noticed she had a serious case of the bunny eyes. “If you want to talk in the dark,
that’s fine too.”

“I don’t want to talk at all. Now would you please get out of my car so I can go home?”

“I doubt very much you’d want your parents to see you like this.”

“Like what?”

“Stoned out of your gourd.”

“Oh.”

She didn’t seem particularly offended—just particularly zonked out. True to form, she leaned back against the headrest and
closed her eyes.

“I’m not that stoned,” she said. Then she let out a manic giggle. “Okay…I’m pretty stoned,” she said, and giggled some more.

When she recovered from the laughing fit, she took a few long pulls from a plastic water bottle, put it back in the cup holder,
and grabbed her backpack from the backseat. She fumbled with the zipper, finally got it to work, and yanked out a bag of blue-corn
chips—which she then had a hard time opening. I did it for her.

“Hey,” she said after jamming a handful into her mouth. “What do you want, anyway?”

“Just to ask you some questions.”

“About what again?”

“Melting Rock.”

“What about it?”

“About what happened there last year.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, head still reclined against the seat. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You know, you really might feel better if you—”

“No. No way.”

If she was starting to get upset, it didn’t seem to impede her appetite; eyes still shut, she grabbed some more chips and
stuffed them into her mouth. I decided to take a different tack.

“How come you decided to change the way you look all of a sudden?”

She opened one eye. “Huh?”

“I was looking at some old pictures from last year’s Melting Rock, and you looked… totally different. Your hair was longer;
you didn’t have any piercings or anything—”

“What’s wrong with the way I look?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “All I’m saying is that in August you looked one way, and by the time the school pictures were taken a
month later, you looked completely different. And I was just wondering… what might make a person change so much in such a
short time?”

She shrugged. “What do you care?”

“I just do. And I was thinking …maybe one reason might be because a person went through some kind of trauma.”

Now both eyes were open, and she was looking at me like she’d love to boot me out of the passenger’s seat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Before she could figure out what I was doing, I reached over and yanked up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to reveal her forearm.
What I saw, unfortunately, was exactly what I’d been afraid I might find: a line of horizontal cuts, both new and scarred
over, marking the skin at varying intervals.

She jerked her arm away. “What do you think you’re—”

“I was wondering why you always wear long pants and long sleeves, even at Melting Rock when it was hot as hell.”

“So what if I—”

“Are you cutting your legs too?”

She bit her bottom lip and stared down at her lap. “None of your business.”

“You can get help, you know.”

She laughed again, but this time there was no humor in it. “Don’t even
go
there.”

“I had a friend in college who cut herself. I know what it’s about—you feel all this pain and the only way you can block it
out is to hurt yourself physically. And the only way you’re going to be able to stop is if you talk about what—”

“I’m fine, okay? I don’t even do it that much anymore.”

“Some of those cuts look pretty fresh.”

Her sleeve was already covering the marks, but she pulled it down even farther. “Would you just leave me alone?”

“Dorrie, what happened to you at Melting Rock?”

She stared out the driver’s-side window. “Nothing.”

“I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Nothing.”

“I know what they did, Dorrie. I know those boys hurt you. I know they were your friends, and you thought you could trust—”

Her head whipped around to face me. “Stop it.”

“Jesus Christ, Dorrie. You’ve got to get this thing out in the open so you can deal with it.”

She started crying then, with a hysteria that probably wouldn’t have been possible without chemical assistance. “Please,”
she said, “please just stop it.…”

“Somebody killed those boys for a reason, Dorrie. It’s taken me a long time to figure it out, but I think I know what they
did. And I think I know who they did it to.”

“No.”
The word became a wail.
“Noooooo.”

“Dorrie, please—”

“No.
No.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no fucking idea—”

“They raped you, didn’t they? Something happened, maybe everybody was high or something, but the situation got out of control
and they attacked you.
Didn’t they?
”

“No.”
She was crying so hard she seemed in actual danger of choking on her own tears. “No—no—no. You’re wrong.”

“That’s why you did this to yourself. That’s why you shaved your head and—”

“No. You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything.”

“Then tell me.”

“It wasn’t me,” she said through the sobs. “It was Trish.”

“
W
HAT
?”

“It was Trish. They raped Trish. Not me—
Trish.
”

I stared at her, face mottled and wet. “Are you serious?” She just kept crying. “Dorrie, are you telling me the truth?”

“Yeah.” Her voice sounded small and faraway.

“Trish? They raped Trish?”

“Y—” She gulped at whatever was running down her throat. “Yeah.”

“What the hell happened?”

She turned on me, suddenly furious. “What do you
think
happened? They raped her, okay? The four of them—Billy and Shaun and Tom and Alan—they got all fucked up on E and they gang-banged
her.”

“They were on ecstasy? But I thought that …I mean, I heard that when guys take it they—”

Another humorless laugh. “Can’t get up for the party? Sometimes. Not this time.”

“Jesus, Dorrie… what happened?”

She shook her head and bit her lip again, this time so hard it had to draw blood. Then she grabbed her bag and pulled out
a pack of cigarettes. She flipped open the top and offered me one first, like the stress of the situation was somehow making
her revert to proper Benson family manners. I took one, she did the same, and she produced a lighter and lit mine first.