Fragile (20 page)

Now she walked over to her desk, called Henry Ivy on his cell phone, and got his voice mail.

“I had a strange call from Marshall,” she said. “Call right away. I’m really worried.”

Then she dialed Leila, Marshall’s aunt, and also got voice mail. She left a similar message. She didn’t expect to hear back, but maybe Leila would relent and send one of the boys over there. As a last resort, she looked up Angie’s number and called her, was surprised when she answered.

“This is Dr. Cooper,” Maggie said.

“I’ve been expecting your call.” Why did everyone keep saying that?

“You have?”

“I should have called you when Marshall went back to Travis. But I …,” she said, letting the sentence trail.

“I’m worried about him,” Maggie said when the other woman didn’t go on. “He seems in a very dark place.”

“He’s vile, Dr. Cooper,” she said sharply. “He’s cruel, he’s abusive. He’s Travis times one hundred. Just like Travis is worse than his father is, none of the old man’s code. Every generation, the gene gets stronger.”

Maggie was surprised into silence by the venom in her voice.

“At least the old man never hit a woman,” Angie went on. “He’d beat the crap out of Travis, but he never hit Travis’s mother or sister.”

Police Chief Crosby still lived in The Hollows, getting more cantankerous and meaner as he got older. Maggie would expect to see him at the town meeting tonight. He was always right on the spot when there was trouble, his role as town cop dying hard.

“Angie—”

“It’s our fault. I know that. Marshall saw violence—terrible, awful violence—before he was old enough to even talk. There was never a warm minute in our house. Never. And I’m sorry for that.”

It occurred to Maggie then that maybe Angie had been drinking, her words tumbling, her tone wavering between angry and maudlin.

“Has something happened between you and Marshall?”

She heard Angie start to cry.

“Has he been violent with you, Angie? We need to address it if he has, because up until now, he hasn’t been violent. And a sudden change in his behavior could suggest a crisis point.”

“I don’t want to get him in trouble, Dr. Cooper. I just want him to stay away from me. Tell him that, will you? Just tell him to stay away?”

The line went dead, and Maggie really wished people would stop hanging up on her. The whole family had a serious problem with abruptly ending unpleasant conversations. Looking at the phone still in her hand, Maggie felt her frustration reach its peak, and she started to internally back away. She was worried about Marshall, but she was equally worried about Charlene, and her own son. She thought about calling Jones, alerting him to the problems with Marshall, but everyone was so focused on Charlene at the moment that she doubted her call would amount to much. She could almost hear Jones.
What do you want me to do, Mags? Bring the kid in because you had a worrying phone call? I’ve got a missing girl here
.

Maggie decided to turn her focus back to the immediate crisis. She walked over to her computer and opened up Facebook, entered the log-in and password Ricky had left for her on a yellow sticky note on her computer screen. He’d wanted her to look at Charlene’s page, see the status bar update that had him so worked up.

The page loaded slowly, Maggie’s computer being old and cluttered with too many files and applications that she had neither the know-how nor the inclination to manage. Eventually, her screen filled with Charlene’s image and a list of comments from friends, all of them on-screen from that day. Where are you, girl? We’re all so worried! Hope you’re livin’ it up in NYC! You rock! I always knew you’d get out of here! Each message was accompanied by a thumbnail image of the sender, most of whom Maggie recognized, all of them vamping or clowning around for the camera. She scrolled through until she found Ricky’s image, where he was doing his best to look arty and haunted. But to Maggie, he just looked like her baby dressed up for Halloween, a little silly and self-conscious. She supposed that was why teenagers never wanted their parents around; parents only saw the children they knew, not the adults they were trying to become. Come home, Char. This is uncool, read Ricky’s message. Please.

Something caught her eye in the left-hand corner of the screen, an area labeled “Mutual Friends.” Charlene and Ricky had nineteen friends
in common; Maggie clicked on the “see all” link, feeling very proud of her technical prowess. She expected to see familiar faces, and she did—Britney, Tiffany, Amber. Cursory glances at their pages showed the usual—messages from friends, favorite books and music, pictures from parties and school events. No indications of the drugs, or alcohol abuse, or teenage sexual depravity that the media would have everyone believe was going on, no seedy underbelly to Hollows High.

But many of the people listed she didn’t recognize. They looked older, though they shared Charlene and Ricky’s gothic chic. She started clicking on pictures and found musicians, nightclubbers, an East Village bar owner, the owner of a seedy-looking recording studio. She knew Ricky and Charlene had been sneaking into the city for a while now, going to shows and clubs—his guilty admission to Chuck was not exactly news to her. She’d done it herself as a kid. Were these the people they were hanging out with? They looked hard-edged and strange, too old for the scene but still hanging on. One young woman had a tattoo on her face, a trail of tears. One pale, too-thin man brooded with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, dark circles under his eyes.

Maggie leaned her head back against the leather of her chair, the brightness of the screen bothering her because of her fatigue and the headache that was increasing behind her eyes. Ricky had given her access to his account. Had he, on some level, wanted her to see these people? He couldn’t have thought she’d just look at Charlene’s page and not explore his. Hadn’t he told her that he didn’t know Char’s friends in the city? That he thought she’d been lying?

Maggie found herself somewhat guiltily scrolling through her son’s in-box, reading messages from friends and acquaintances. There was nothing that caused her concern. All the messages were from friends she knew well, concerning homework or band gigs, gossip, plans for the weekends. Even the notes between Ricky and Charlene were pretty PG-rated, almost, she thought, pointedly so. She’d always warned him against considering his online activities private. He’d obviously taken her advice to heart. Or, knowing that he’d given away his password, he’d cleaned up his in-box.

At the bottom of the list of mutual friends, she saw an image she
didn’t expect: Marshall Crosby. She clicked on the picture, a dark photo, obviously taken in poor lighting by his computer camera. He looked slouched, and ghoulish around the eyes; the room behind him was a mess of books and tossed clothes, stacks of video games, soda cans in a line along a dresser, rock posters covering the wall. As his page loaded, she saw that most of the fields, like favorite books and films, were blank. Even the profile area glowed white, empty of the details she expected to see. The only area where he had seen fit to enter information was the status bar, and what he’d written there, thirteen minutes earlier, caused a cold finger to trace Maggie’s spine: Marshall thinks bad people should be punished.

In Maggie’s memory, it had snowed for days. But it hadn’t really. In fact, there was just the initial light snowfall that coated Sarah’s newly dead body so that when Chief Crosby first saw her, he thought she was a fallen branch, so thin and still and dark was her form. The days that followed were characterized by freezing precipitation—sleet, a light rain—the tentative spring abandoning The Hollows as the shock of it all settled and everyone found themselves shuffling stunned and stricken from assembly to counseling, if they wanted it, then to the horrifying open-casket wake and grim burial.

Maggie found that she could hardly take it in; none of it seemed quite real. Even now, she remembered it only in snapshots—Sarah’s mother collapsing at her daughter’s grave, her own mother clinging to her in a way she never had before or since, maintaining a grip on wrist or shoulder or elbow for days, it seemed. She remembered Sarah stiff and bloated in her casket, a waxen image of herself, not a girl filled with music, not a girl at all. The mortician had filled in the cuts on her face with some thick kind of makeup, but still you could see them there, a faint spiderweb of lines, like the cracks in the face of a porcelain doll that had been broken and glued back together. Her face looked painted on, hideous, a death mask. Maggie could still hear Sarah’s mother wailing if she thought on it, could feel the sound of it reverberating in her own chest.

She’d been younger than Ricky was now, in her sophomore year at Hollows High. She’d been sheltered, her schedule strictly maintained by Elizabeth. Home right after school unless she had an extracurricular activity, have a snack and relax, homework, then play with friends or watch television. Dinner was always at 6:30, bedtime no later than 9:00. She’d railed against all the rules, felt smothered by her mother’s constant questions. Rebelled by doing things to her appearance, like dyeing her hair, getting multiple piercings in her ears. Elizabeth had reminded her of this, not without a tiny bit of glee, when Ricky started his descent into gothic punk. Maggie realized she was every bit as on top of Ricky as Elizabeth had been on top of her, constantly talking, asking questions, maintaining routine.
Well
, she thought,
there it is. I’ve become my mother
.

“Do you think you would have been able to walk out the door after a fight?” her mother was saying as they drove to the meeting. She looked as tiny as a child in the huge passenger seat of Maggie’s SUV. Again, the heat was cranking; Elizabeth had always hated the cold. “That I would just let you walk off and not go after you? Ridiculous.”

“I know.” Maggie had called her mother after she learned about the meeting, and Elizabeth wanted to attend. She’d phoned Ricky at the record shop, and his boss had agreed to let him go so that he could be there, too. He was planning to meet them at the school.

“That girl,” Elizabeth said. Maggie knew she was talking about Melody, not Charlene. “There was always something about her.”

“She’s not a girl anymore, Mom. She’s a mother whose daughter is missing. She needs our compassion and our help.”

Elizabeth snorted. “You’re such a shrink, Magpie,” she said, mock-crotchety.

“Mom,” Maggie chastised, but she felt a smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

Her mother took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose.

“What do you remember about that time?”

“What time?” her mother asked, not turning to look at her.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Maggie said, annoyed that her
mother was being purposely obtuse. She always did that when she didn’t want to talk about something.

“I knew you’d bring that up.”

“How could it not come to mind?”

“I remember everything about it. Every detail. Every ugly minute. It was the worst thing that ever happened to this town.”

Maggie waited for her mother to go on. Then, “They say your memory fades when you get older. I wish it were true. You forget things like where you put your keys or your glasses, you space out on doctors’ appointments. But the bad stuff stays, Maggie. The old things you’d rather forget, those memories move closer, grow more vivid.”

“Like what? What do you remember?”

They were stopped at a light. It changed to green without Maggie noticing until someone behind them leaned on his horn. They both jumped a little, and Maggie lifted a hand in apology, moved forward.

“Everyone’s in a big rush,” said Elizabeth.

Maggie figured that her mother was just going to ignore her question, that she’d have to press. And she was prepared to press. She wanted to talk about Sarah, for some reason. Since Melody had brought it up, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Does Jones ever talk about it?
Melody had asked. Why had she wanted to know that? It was such a strange question.

Maggie was about to push Elizabeth to answer, but her mother started talking.

“Of all the terrible feelings and awful memories from that time, you know what bothers me the most?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I never believed that he killed her.”

Something about the way she said it gave Maggie a strange little jolt of dread.

“He confessed, Mom,” she said.

“I know he did,” Elizabeth answered, her voice flat. She cleared her throat and looked down at her lap. She smoothed out her skirt with two flat palms, a determined little sweep of her hands; it was a familiar
gesture to Maggie, something her mother did when she wanted to avert her gaze.

“You never told me this.”

“What’s to tell? It’s just a feeling. I knew that boy. I just never did believe he had it in him. It’s always bothered me.”

“If not him, then who?”

Elizabeth released a breath. “Now, the answer to that might just be what kept me from asking the question in the first place.”

Maggie didn’t say anything, taking in her mother’s words.

There was never any doubt that Tommy Delano killed Sarah. There had always been something wrong with him. Everybody said so. Since he was a boy, he’d been unnaturally quiet, occasionally prone to blank but terrifying rages. As an adult, he had often been seen slinking about the garage where he worked, lurking in corners, watching in that quiet way he had. Or he might have been spotted walking aimlessly through town, or hanging around the arcade or the pizzeria where the younger kids gathered. When people mentioned him, they used words like “creepy,” or “odd.” They said he had a way with cars, though. That he was a talented mechanic, a tireless worker. They said all those things about him, and so they were all true.

They also said that he killed his mother. It was an accident; a terrible fall from a steep staircase into the basement. His father found them. The boy sitting mute at the top, his mother in a heap on the floor below, neck broken, blood pooling. What precisely happened or how long he’d been sitting there was not clear. But the incident followed him through grade school, middle school, high school, and beyond. The story was whispered behind his back over two generations. He became a kind of bogeyman to some.
He walks the woods behind the school, watches the girls. Watch out. Tommy Delano’s waiting for you
.