Nineteen Minutes (19 page)

The pastor looked out over the congregation. “The death of a loved one can shake us to our very foundations. When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us. We cannot have Matt back, but we can rest easy knowing that he’s found the peace in death he was denied here on earth.”

Matt didn’t go to church. His parents did, and they tried to make him go, but Josie knew he hated it. He thought it was a waste of a Sunday, and that if God was at all worthy of hanging around with, he’d probably be out riding around with the top down on his Jeep or playing pickup pond hockey instead of sitting in a stuffy building doing responsive reading.

The pastor moved aside, and Matt’s father stood up. Josie knew him, of course-he cracked the worst jokes, silly puns that were never funny. He’d played hockey at UVM until he blew out his knee, and he’d had high hopes for Matt. But overnight, he’d turned hunch-shouldered and sullen, like a husk that used to contain the whole of him. He stood up and talked about the first time he’d taken Matt out to skate, how he’d started out pulling him along on the end of a hockey stick and realized, not much later, that Matt wasn’t holding on. In the front row, Matt’s mother began crying. Loud, noisy sobs-the kind that splattered against the walls of the church like paint.

Before Josie realized what she was doing, she’d gotten to her feet. “Josie!” her mother whispered, fierce, beside her-in that instant a flicker of the mother she was accustomed to, the one who would never make a spectacle of herself. Josie was shaking so hard that her feet did not seem to touch the ground, not as she stepped into the aisle in the black dress she had borrowed from her mother, not as she moved toward Matt’s coffin, magnetically drawn to a pole.

She could feel Matt’s father’s eyes on her, could hear the whispers of the congregation. She reached the casket, polished to such a gleam that she could see her own face reflected back at her, an imposter.

“Josie,” Mr. Royston said, coming down from the podium to embrace her. “You all right?”

Josie’s throat closed like a rosebud. How could this man, whose son was dead, be asking her that? She felt herself dissolving, and wondered if you could turn into a ghost without dying; if that part of it was only a technicality.

“Did you want to say something?” Mr. Royston offered. “About Matt?”

Before she knew what was happening, Matt’s father had led her up to the podium. She was vaguely aware of her mother, who’d gotten out of her seat in the pew and was edging her way down toward the front of the church-to do what? Spirit her away? Stop her from making another mistake?

Josie stared out at a landscape of faces she recognized and did not really know at all. She loved him, they were all thinking. She was with him when he died. Her breath caught like a moth in the cage of her lungs.

But what would she say? The truth?

Josie felt her lips twist, her face crumple. She started to sob, so hard that the wooden floorboards of the church bowed and creaked; so hard that even in that sealed casket, Josie was sure Matt could hear her. “I’m sorry,” she choked out-to him, to Mr. Royston, to anyone who would listen. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

She did not notice her mother climbing the steps to the podium, wrapping an arm around Josie, leading her behind the altar to a little vestibule used by the organist. She didn’t protest when her mother handed her Kleenex and rubbed her back. She didn’t even mind when her mother tucked her hair back behind her ears, the way she used to when Josie was so small, she could barely remember the gesture. “Everyone must think I’m an idiot,” Josie said.

“No, they think you miss Matt.” Her mother hesitated. “I know you believe this was your fault.”

Josie’s heart was pounding so hard, it moved the thin chiffon fabric of the dress.

“Sweetheart,” her mother said, “you couldn’t have saved him.”

Josie reached for another tissue, and pretended that her mother understood.

Maximum security meant Peter did not have a roommate. He did not get recreation time. His food was brought to him three times a day in his cell. His reading material was restricted by the correctional officers. And because the staff still believed he might be suicidal, his room consisted of a toilet and a bench-no sheets, no mattress, nothing that might be fashioned into a means of checking out of this world.

There were four hundred and fifteen cinder blocks on the back wall of his cell; he’d counted. Twice. Since then, he’d taken the time to stare right at the camera that was watching him. Peter wondered who was at the other end of that camera. He pictured a bunch of COs clustered around a crummy TV monitor, poking each other and cracking up when Peter had to go to the bathroom. Or, in other words, yet another group of people who’d find a way to make fun of him.

The camera had a red light on it, a power indicator, and a single lens that shimmered like a rainbow. There was a rubber bumper around the lens that looked like an eyelid. It struck Peter that even if he wasn’t suicidal, a few weeks of this and he would be.

It did not get dark in jail, just dim. That hardly mattered, since there was nothing to do but sleep anyway. Peter lay on the bench, wondering if you lost your hearing if you never had to use it; if the power of speech worked the same way. He remembered learning in one of his social studies classes that in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead. The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn’t handle the confinement, but Peter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when you didn’t want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room.

One of the COs had just come through, doing his security sweep-a heavy-booted run past the cells-when Peter heard it:

I know what you did.

Holy shit, Peter thought. I’ve already started to go crazy.

Everyone knows.

Peter swung his feet to the cement floor and stared at the camera, but it wasn’t giving up any secrets.

The voice sounded like wind passing over snow-bleak, a whisper. “To your right,” it said, and Peter slowly got to his feet and walked to a corner of the cell.

“Who…who’s there?” he said.

“It’s about fucking time. I thought you were never going to stop wailing.”

Peter tried to see through the bars, but couldn’t. “You heard me crying?”

“Fucking baby,” the voice said. “Grow the fuck up.”

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Carnivore, like everyone else.”

Peter swallowed. “What did you do?”

“Nothing they said I did,” Carnivore answered. “How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long till your trial?”

Peter didn’t know. It was the one question he had forgotten to ask Jordan McAfee, probably because he was afraid to hear the answer.

“Mine’s next week,” Carnivore said before Peter could reply.

The metal door of the cell felt like ice against his temple. “How long have you been here?” Peter asked.

“Ten months,” Carnivore answered.

Peter imagined sitting in this cell for ten straight months. He thought about all the times he’d count those stupid cinder blocks, all the pisses that the guards would get to watch on their little television set.

“You killed kids, right? You know what happens in this jail to guys who kill kids?”

Peter didn’t respond. He was roughly the same age as everyone at Sterling High; it wasn’t like he’d gone into a nursery school. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t had a good reason.

He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “How come you didn’t get bail?”

Carnivore scoffed. “Because they say I raped some waitress, and then stabbed her.”

Did everyone in this jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on that bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail-and as it turned out, that was a lie.

Did he sound like this to Jordan?

“You still there?” Carnivore asked.

Peter lay back down on his bench without saying another word. He turned his face to the wall, and he pretended not to hear as the man next to him tried over and over to make a connection.

The first thing that struck Patrick, again, was how much younger Judge Cormier looked when she wasn’t on the bench. She answered the door in jeans and a ponytail, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Josie stood just behind her, her face washed by the same vacant stare he’d seen a dozen times over, now, in other victims he’d interviewed. Josie was a vital piece in the puzzle, the only one who had seen Peter kill Matthew Royston. But unlike those victims, Josie had a mother who knew the intricacies of the legal system.

“Judge Cormier,” he said. “Josie. Thanks for letting me come over.”

The judge stared at him. “This is a waste of time. Josie doesn’t remember anything.”

“With all due respect, Judge, it’s my job to hear that from Josie herself.”

He steeled himself for an argument, but she stepped back to let him inside. Patrick let his eyes roam the foyer-the antique table with a spider plant spilling over its surface, the tasteful landscapes that hung on the walls. So this was how a judge lived. His own place was a pit stop, a haven of laundry and old newspapers and food long past its expiration date, where he’d go for a few hours between his stints at the office.

He turned to Josie. “How’s the head?”

“It still hurts,” she said, so softly that Patrick had to strain to hear her.

He turned to the judge again. “Is there a room where we could go talk for a few minutes?”

She led them into the kitchen, which looked like just the kind of kitchen Patrick sometimes thought about when he imagined where he should have been by now. There were cherry cabinets and lots of sun streaming through the bay window and a bowl of bananas on the counter. He sat down across from Josie, expecting the judge to pull up a chair beside her daughter, but to his surprise she remained standing. “If you need me,” she said, “I’ll be upstairs.”

Josie looked up, pained. “Can’t you just stay?”

For a moment, Patrick saw something light in the judge’s eyes-want? regret?-but it vanished before he could put a name to it. “You know I can’t,” she said gently.

Patrick didn’t have any kids of his own, but he was pretty damn sure that if one of his had come this close to dying, he’d have a hard time letting her out of his sight. He did not know exactly what was going on between the mother and daughter, but he knew better than to get in the middle of it.

“I’m sure Detective Ducharme will make this utterly painless,” the judge said.

It was part wish, part warning. Patrick nodded at her. A good cop did whatever he could to protect and serve, but when it was someone you knew who was robbed or threatened or hurt, the stakes changed. You’d make a few more phone calls; you’d shuffle your responsibilities so that one took priority. Patrick had experienced that, to a greater degree, years ago with his friend Nina and her son. He didn’t know Josie Cormier personally, but her mother was in the field of law enforcement-Christ, she was at its top level-and for this, her daughter deserved to be treated with kid gloves.

He watched Alex walk up the stairs, and then he took a pad and pencil out of his coat pocket. “So,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Look, you don’t have to pretend you care.”

“I’m not pretending,” Patrick said.

“I don’t even get why you’re here. It’s not like anything anyone says to you is going to make those kids less dead.”

“That’s true,” Patrick agreed, “but before we can try Peter Houghton we need to know exactly what happened. And unfortunately, I wasn’t there.”

“Unfortunately?”

He looked down at the table. “I sometimes think it’s easier to be the one who’s been hurt than the one who couldn’t stop it from happening.”

“I was there,” Josie said, shaken. “I couldn’t stop it.”

“Hey,” Patrick said, “it’s not your fault.”

She looked up at him then, as if she so badly wished she could believe that, but knew he was wrong. And who was Patrick to tell her otherwise? Every time he envisioned his mad dash to Sterling High, he imagined what would have happened if he’d been at the school when the shooter first arrived. If he’d disarmed the kid before anyone was hurt.

“I don’t remember anything about the shooting,” Josie said.

“Do you remember being in the gym?”

Josie shook her head.

“How about running there with Matt?”

“No. I don’t even remember getting up and going to school in the first place. It’s like a blank spot in my head that I just skip over.”

Patrick knew, from talking to the shrinks who’d been assigned to work with the victims, that this was perfectly normal. Amnesia was one way for the mind to protect itself from reliving something that would otherwise break you apart. In a way, he wished he could be as lucky as Josie, that he could make what he’d seen vanish.

“What about Peter Houghton? Did you know him?”

“Everyone knew who he was.”

“What do you mean?”

Josie shrugged. “He got noticed.”

“Because he was different from everyone else?”

Josie thought about this for a moment. “Because he didn’t try to fit in.”

“You were dating Matthew Royston?”

Immediately, tears welled in Josie’s eyes. “He liked to be called Matt.”

Patrick reached for a paper napkin and passed it to Josie. “I’m sorry about what happened to him, Josie.”

She ducked her head. “Me too.”

He waited for her to wipe her eyes, blow her nose. “Do you know why Peter might have disliked Matt?”

“People used to make fun of him,” Josie said. “It wasn’t just Matt.”

Did you? Patrick thought. He’d looked at the yearbook confiscated from Peter’s room-the circles around certain kids who became victims, and others who did not. There were many reasons for this-from the fact that Peter ran out of time to the truth that hunting down thirty people in a school of a thousand was more difficult than he’d imagined. But of all the targets Peter had marked in the yearbook, only Josie’s photo had been crossed out, as if he’d changed his mind. Only her face had words printed beneath it, in block letters: LET LIVE.