Ecstasy (6 page)

I finally fell asleep around four, only to get up before seven. That would’ve been bad enough, but what woke me was way worse.

It was the sound of a girl screaming.

Screaming, as they say, to wake the dead.

I
’m not sure how I knew something was really wrong—that this was something other than the usual drug-addled hijinks. I mean,
it wasn’t as though people hadn’t been hollering all night long, a few even shouting “Help” at the top of their lungs. But
there was always some mitigating factor in their voices, a layer of laughter or irony or plain-old inebriation that told you
that everything was okay.

This time, the cry that streaked across the field of tents was 100 percent pure; it contained horror and nothing but. It started
off with a shriek, piercing and awful and long enough to wake me up in time to hear the rest. “Help me,” it said. “Oh, God,
please, somebody help me….”

The campground was silent for a few beats before voices erupted all around; people were trying to figure out whether the screams
were for real, and if they were, where they were coming from. I was about to scramble out of my tent when I realized that
I was wearing nothing but a tank top and a pair of pink cotton panties that said
TUESDAY
. Half-zombified, I rooted around in the half-light for some shorts and a sweat jacket; once I found my clothes I did another
Braille search for my glasses.

By the time I found them and got out of the tent, there were dozens of other people standing around trying to figure out what
they were supposed to do. A couple of seconds later, there was another shout from the same direction, this time a man’s voice.
It was a lot calmer, though still fairly freaked out. “Somebody get the EMTs,” he said. “Does anybody have a cell phone? Somebody
needs to call an ambulance. Come on, somebody’s gotta have a cell phone….”

I did, but before I could yell back, someone else beat me to it. So I followed the scraggly crowd toward the epicenter of
the distress, which turned out to be a battered blue tent festooned with blinking red lights shaped like chili peppers. There
were a couple of folding chairs by the open flap, and lying on the ground in front of them was the body of a young man.

I say
body
because even from a distance—even peeking through the gaps in the crowd—I could tell he was dead. His eyes were glassy and
staring, like the vacant expression you see on a deer lashed to a car hood during hunting season.

The girl was still screaming, grabbing the front of his T-shirt and yanking it toward her as though the motion could wake
him. But all it did was roll him from side to side—not much, but enough so his head rocked back and forth in some awful parody
of being alive.

In a weird way, neither one of them looked human. She was shrieking like an animal; he was lying there like some sort of horror-movie
prop.

Maybe that’s why it took me so long to recognize them. But after a couple of minutes—once an older woman had wrapped her arms
around the girl and gotten her to calm down a little—I noticed that she had purple hair. Even at Melting Rock, it was pretty
damn distinctive.

The girl was Cindy Bauer.

That made me take a closer look at the corpse. It had a wispy goatee, but no glasses—another reason why the face hadn’t seemed
familiar.

But it was. The dead guy was Shaun Kirtz.

K
EEPING AN AMBULANCE
parked at the entrance to the fairgrounds is the town of Jaspersburg’s major contribution to Melting Rock public safety.
In this case, though, it didn’t do much good. Although a pair of EMTs came jogging over with their bags and stretcher within
a matter of minutes—while I was still standing there reeling at the fact that I actually
knew
these two kids—it was obvious the victim was way beyond saving. They messed with him a little, but you could tell it was
just for show—whether for themselves or for the crowd, I wasn’t quite sure.

Before long, the woman EMT shook her head and her partner, a guy barely older than the one they’d been working on, pulled
a walkie-talkie off his belt and spoke into it. They sat there on their haunches for a few seconds; then the woman noticed
Cindy, still whimpering and sobbing in the arms of a middle-aged lady with a gray-flecked ponytail and a Fifth Dimension T-shirt.

The female paramedic went over and guided the girl back to one of the folding chairs so she could check her vital signs. She
must not have liked what she saw, because she got a concerned expression on her face and pulled out her own radio. Then she
called to her partner to help her get Cindy on the stretcher—not a big one with wheels but the hand-carried kind with fabric
strapped to a metal frame. I figured they’d whisk her off, but the woman just knelt by Cindy and covered her with a thin blue
blanket, alternately saying vaguely soothing things and checking her watch.

After a few minutes of this—just when she’d unzipped her bag like she was going to administer something—another pair of EMTs
showed up. They stood over the body with a distasteful sort of detachment, like a couple of DPW guys assessing a pothole.
The woman went over to talk to them, and when she was done, she and her partner picked up Cindy and hauled her away.

The two new EMTs had clearly been given the job of babysitting the body and weren’t happy about it. They stood there looking
uncomfortable, crossing and uncrossing their arms, periodically glancing in the direction they’d come from. The collective
shock was wearing off, and the crowd was starting to bug them—wanting explanations for what had happened to the poor kid,
even though the two of them had just gotten there and obviously hadn’t the slightest clue. They kept having to ask the crowd
to stand back, to “keep the area clear,” but shock was turning to agitation and the EMTs were severely outnumbered. Eventually,
a trio of volunteer firemen showed up, all wearing baseball hats and yellow jackets over blue jeans. They joined the other
two, who looked decidedly relieved to have reinforcements.

“What’s going on?” The voice came from behind me, so close it made me jump. I turned around, and there was Lauren Potter.
“Hey,” she was saying, “what’s all the buzz about? Did somebody get sick?”

She tried to peer through the thickening crowd, though by now neither of us could see much. “What’s up, anyway?” she said
again, her voice tinged with classic rubbernecker’s relish. “Are they taking somebody to the hospital?”

“Um…I think they already did.”

“No way. You know who?” She looked over at me, and I realized she hadn’t recognized me before. “Oh, hey, hi, Alex. So what’s
going on? Somebody get sick or something?”

“Listen, Lauren….Are any of your other friends around here anywhere?”

She looked thoroughly flummoxed. “Uh…I dunno. Why?”

“Is”—I grappled for the name—“Tom around here maybe?”

“I don’t know where he is. I’ve been looking for him for a while. Why?” Now she was starting to get worried. She looked from
me to the crowd and back again. “What’s going on?”

When I didn’t answer her—mostly because I had no idea what to say—she made a move toward the commotion. I grabbed her arm
and held her back. “Wait,” I said. “You don’t want to go over there.”

She stared at me for a second, then tried to break free. I held on. “Hey, what the—”

“It’s…”I chickened out, if only briefly. “It’s your friend Cindy.”

She stopped struggling. “What happened to her? Is she okay?”

“She kind of collapsed. They took her to the hospital.”

“Oh, my God. Is she gonna be okay?”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“But what
happened?
” She started chewing on a pinkie nail. “Oh, man, her mom is gonna freak. Does Alan know?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I didn’t see him around here.”

“I gotta find him.…” She started looking around, then seemed to realize there was still something major happening at the epicenter
of the crowd. “What is going on over there, anyway?”

Damn.
“I…It’s Shaun.”

“Shaun?”

“Yeah.”

It was only one word, but apparently it was enough for her to get the drift that something was seriously wrong. She gave me
a look that was both confused and hostile, then blew past me and elbowed her way through the crowd. I was too short to see
what happened next, but I could hear it; for the second time in one morning, the tent city echoed with a young girl’s scream.

A
S A REPORTER
, I’ve been compared to a vulture more times than I care to count. Also a leech, and a vampire… and a parasite too.

All the aforementioned creatures prey on the misfortune of others; they can’t survive without somebody’s lifeblood to suck
or corpse to ravage.

Now, this certainly isn’t nice, but occasionally it’s true. Like the members of many other professions—doctors and cops are
the obvious ones—we journalists tend to do our best work when other people’s lives have gone all to hell.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of covering major tragedies, or minor ones, either. Being the stereotypical newshound
who sticks a tape recorder in the face of some woman who’s just lost her daughter in a plane crash and asking, “So how do
you feel?” makes me sick to my stomach.

Still, there’s no arguing with the fact that my life got a whole lot more interesting after poor Shaun Kirtz, as his hippie
mother would later put it, “crossed over to a friendlier realm.” Suddenly, I wasn’t just covering a music festival that had
gone off pretty much unchanged for the past dozen years; I was covering a music festival during which a teenage boy had—as
the rumor mill instantly reported—died from an overdose of some unspecified recreational substance.

I called Bill as soon as I was sure Lauren was okay. He made no particular pretense of being bummed out by the young man’s
demise. When I told him that Melissa had previously taken the guy’s photo, he was positively gleeful.

But to go back to what happened during the event itself: From the time the EMTs left with Cindy, it took the Jaspersburg cops
the better part of an hour to show up—and mere seconds to piss everybody off once they got there.

First they sniped at the firemen for letting the crowd get too close to the body; then they declared everything within a ten-yard
radius off-limits, which meant that about fifty people were forbidden from entering their own tents. I expected them to cordon
off the area with crime-scene tape, but apparently they didn’t have any—or if they did, nobody could find it. Eventually,
one of the volunteer firemen left, returning a few minutes later with a yellow roll that, when unfurled, turned out to say
WET PAINT
.

I tried to get some information out of the cops, but they weren’t in a talkative mood. One of them told me to back off until
the chief got there; he proved to be the charmer of the two, since the other told me to back off or get arrested.

“Arrested for what?” I said.

“I’ll think of something,” he said.

I backed off.

News of the death was spreading through the festival at light speed, the crowd getting bigger (and the cops more ornery) by
the minute. I was navigating my way through the sea of agitated humanity, not sure where exactly I was going, when I ran into
two other members of the Jaspersburg Eight: Billy Halpern and Dorrie Benson.

I was fully prepared to turn tail and run—there was no way I was breaking the news to more of Kirtz’s friends—but they caught
sight of me, and one look in their eyes told me they already knew.

It wasn’t that they were crying or anything, just standing there looking totally helpless and sucking on cigarettes like the
butts supplied oxygen instead of carbon monoxide. When I got over to them, I realized that Trish Stilwell was standing on
their far side, so small and slight I hadn’t seen her. She wasn’t crying, either, but she’d obviously just stopped; her eyes
were dazed and red, lids puffy and lashes clumped together.

“You heard?” Billy asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you know if Lauren’s all right?”

“She went to lay down in her tent.” He reached up to take another drag on the cigarette, and I noticed his hands were shaking.
It was hard to reconcile this version of Billy with the hipster from the day before; he came off as a whole lot younger and
way less cocky. “She asked us to look for Tom and tell him to come stay with her. You seen him?”

“No. Sorry.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Dorrie said, wrapping her arms around herself so tightly the cigarette seemed to sprout from her
left shoulder. “This is like some nightmare, you know? Poor Shaun.…”

“Poor Cindy,” Trish whispered.

“Poor Cindy,” Dorrie echoed. “You think she’s gonna be okay?”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine. She was probably just in shock.”

“Of course she was in shock,” Dorrie said. “Can you imagine how awful that was, watching Shaun—” She cut herself off. “Of
course she was in shock,” she said again. “Wouldn’t you be?”

Billy shrugged, then parked his eyes on my reporter’s notebook. “You gonna put this in the paper.”

“You mean Shaun dying?” He nodded. I nodded back. “It’ll be in tomorrow.”

“You mean, like, with his name and all?”

“I assume so. The only reason we wouldn’t run his name is if the cops can’t notify his family in time.”

I girded myself for a lecture about how much newspapers suck, but none of them seemed particularly pissed about it. Dorrie
tilted her head so she could take a drag off the cigarette without unfolding her arms. “You mean, you won’t say his name if
they don’t tell his mom first?”

“Nobody wants somebody’s family to find out they’re dead from reading the newspaper.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s good, I guess.” The other two nodded vaguely.

“Listen,” I said, “I hate to ask you this, but I’m gonna have to write a story about Shaun for the paper. Do you think you
guys would mind talking about him?”