Secrets 01 Secrets in the Attic (9 page)

me, myself,
and
I.
I
hated hearing her talk about her own mother that way. It brought tears to my eyes, for I could never in a million years imagine myself talking like that about my mother.
"You'll see," she continued. "After a while, it will be like I never existed. Oh, she'll put on a good act in the beginning. She's probably at home right now, bawling her eyes out for the police and friends, accepting sympathy like some pauper on the street filling her hands with charity. I'm sure it's already 'poor Darlene, poor, poor Darlene' First she loses a young husband to a freaky heart attack, and then she loses her new wonderful provider to the evil and viciousness of a self-centered, miserable daughter who never showed any appreciation for her wonderful gifts and loving stepfather. I could write the gossip and hand it out for the people of this village to recite," she said bitterly. "You know I could, and you know in your heart that I'm right about all of it."
I took a deep breath. Yes, everything she was saying was surely true, I thought.
"Look," she said reaching for my hand. "You're going to be questioned by the police. You were practically the only friend I had at school, and we spent so much time together. You better practice in front of a mirror or in front of me, so you don't give anything away or break down."
I shook my head. Just the thought of such a thing put the tremors in me.
"Are you sure the police will be asking me questions?"
"Yes, Zipporah. Be real. We couldn't be closer friends, could we? All right," she said, letting go of my hand and standing. She walked about for a few moments with her hands behind her and then turned and glared down at me. "Zipporah, when was the last time you saw Karen Stoker?"
"The last time?"
"Don't repeat the questions. It looks like you're trying to come up with a lie. Just answer them. When was the last time?"
"Um . . . when I was over at your house talking about the short story and . . ."
"Oh, Zipporah. Are you crazy? Think before you speak." She walked over to a table and picked up the book of short stories. "I had the sense to bring this back to you for you to put back on the bookshelves. No one must ever know we read and used the story in here. If anything makes you an accomplice to all this, it's the book. See? Even in my most dreadful moment, I was thinking more of you."
She tossed it into my lap.
"Let's return to the question. When did you last see Karen Stoker?"
I took a breath, looked down at the book and then up at her. "At her house, when I went over to do homework with her."
"Good. And at that time or any time before, did she indicate or say anything about wanting to hurt her stepfather? Well?"
"No, nothing," I said quickly.
"Nothing? Not even a wishful thought?"
"She . . ."
"Yes?"
"Wished her real father was still alive. She cried a lot about him, about losing him."
"Good. Do you have any idea why she would want to kill her stepfather?"
"What should I say?" I asked her.
"Just say no, Zipporah. If you tell them anything, you'll have to tell them everything. You were my friend, but you had no idea about anything that happened in my house. Leave it that way." "They won't believe me," I moaned.
"Get them to believe you for your own benefit," she advised. "All this is just as much a shock to you as anyone. Cry a lot. That will put a quick end to it."
"I won't have any trouble doing that:'
"Good." She looked around and smiled. "It'll be fine. We'll do fine," she said. "I'm hungry. I'd go down with you, but your father's surely coming home soon. I'm sure your mother's called him. Be careful not to get caught gathering food to bring up, need water, too. Fill up a few quarts."
She laughed and walked toward one of the dressers, bending over to pick up something beside it. She showed it to me. "Remember when we didn't know what this was, this chamber pot?"
"Yes."
"Looks like I'm going back to the nineteenth century in a hurry," she said. "Don't worry. I'll take care of all that."
"It will be so unpleasant for you, Karen."
"Not anywhere nearly as unpleasant as it has been in my own home. You know that."
I rose. "Okay. I'll get the food and water."
"And books . . . start thinking of other books for me to read. I'd like to keep my mind off things for a while," she said.
"Right "
"And magazines, too. Lots of magazines," she called as I walked toward the attic door.
"Right"
"I'll stay up all night and sleep most of the day. I'll be like a vampire."
I nodded and hurried down the stairs and to the kitchen to get what she needed before my father did come home. She was probably right about my mother calling him and both of them worrying about me. I fumbled about because I was so nervous and I was rushing so much, but I managed to put together a platter of cold chicken, some salad and bread, and a piece of cake. I found a carton and put everything in it along with two quarts of water, using empty milk bottles.
Hurrying up the stairs, I nearly tripped. She was waiting in the doorway and took the carton from me.
"Great," she said looking at it all. "Perfect. This is going to be fun. You'll see."
Fun? How could this possibly be any fun?
We both heard what sounded like a car pulling into our driveway and the garage door going up.
"My father!" I said, practically choking on the words.
"Calm down. He won't know I'm here unless you do something very stupid. Go on back to your room."
I nodded and moved quickly down the short stairway. I got into my room just as my father entered the house. He called my name and started up the stairs. I plopped onto my bed and held my breath. He knocked on my door.
"Come in," I said.
He opened the door slowly.
"Hey, kid-o," he said, smiling. "How are you doing?"
"Okay," I said.
"A real shocker," he said, shaking his head and coming farther into my room. He blew some air between his lips and sat on the bed. "I can appreciate how difficult all this is for you to process."
I didn't say anything. I kept my eyes toward the ceiling, nervous that Karen might drop something or do something that made enough noise to attract my father's attention. I was literally holding my breath. I saw him glance at me and then look away.
"Your mother is worried about you, and since she's a nurse as well as a mother, I thought I'd better get just as worried real quickly," he said, trying to insert some humor.
Instead of smiling, I closed my eyes.
"So tell me, honey, did you have any idea, any inkling, that such a thing might happen?" he asked.
I let out my breath. I was about to take my first step into the world of deception and lies, hiding the truth from the people I loved the most in the world, betraying their trust, and risking their deep-seated disappointment and anger forever and ever. This was the crossroads I had feared approaching the moment I heard what Karen had done.
Few of us get to know and understand the moment when our childhood ends and our adulthood begins. In childhood, all our feelings are simple and easy. Nothing is really very complicated. We want this; we can't have that. We love this person; we don't love or even like that one. We're excused from responsibilities or agree to our little chores. Our decisions are about things so trivial that later on, it makes us laugh at how much weight and importance we put on them. There is, after all, no greater dispensation, no excusing and forgiving coming from anything as much as from our youth. We are protected by the simple phrase,
too young to know or appreciate the full extent of her actions.

A fifteen-year-old girl can commit an act as terrible and as significant as what a twenty-one-yearold could do, and she will be known as a juvenile. It doesn't matter how bright she is or how sophisticated. Her age is all that matters.

Here I go, I thought again. In my heart, I knew that someday I would regret and struggle to explain myself to the people I loved, but for now, there was nothing to do but remain a juvenile on the surface while making a major adult decision.

He nodded and wore that face that my mother said made him so successful in a courtroom. Why couldn't I have inherited his ability to look so unrevealing or what my mother called "poker-faced"?

"No wonder he wins at cards. He's good at bluffing," she said. "Half the time, I can't tell if he means what he says or not."

"Well, honey," he said now, "because everyone knows you and Karen were close friends, the police want to talk to you as soon as they can. I got a call from the township police chief just a little while ago. They'd like to come here or have me take you to the station. Which would you prefer?"

"The station," I said quickly. It was terrifying to think of the police in the house with Karen up in the attic.

"Okay. I'll be right there with you the whole time. You just answer their questions truthfully, and that will be that." He glanced at his watch. "Why don't we say we'll leave here in about fifteen minutes? I've got a few calls to make to the office. Don't worry about putting on any different sort of clothing or anything. We go there, get it over with, and then how about the two of us going to Carnesi's for pizza? I'm in the mood, if you are."

"Okay," I said. At the moment, the more time we were out of the house, the better I thought it would be for Karen. I wished there were some way I could tell her what was happening. I could take a chance and run up the stairs to the attic, but if my father heard me, he would wonder why, and I could give it all away.

He leaned over to kiss me and then left. I heard him go downstairs. I went into the bathroom, threw cold water on my face, and ran a brush through my hair. Then I left, gazing up the stairway toward the attic door. I was tempted, but I resisted and instead went downstairs to meet him.

"Don't worry about it. They just have their job to do. We'll be in and out in no time."
It wasn't until we were in his car and backing out of the driveway that he turned and asked me if I had any idea where Karen might have gone. I know my eyes shifted, and I looked up at one of the attic windows, but luckily, he was looking at the road and didn't see.
"She always wanted to live in a big city," I said, which was true. "She wished she would grow older faster so she could leave and be on her own."
"Really? Well, unless she has some money, she's going to find that living in a city is much more difficult than she thinks. They'll know if she boarded one of the buses heading to New York. There aren't too many people traveling back and forth yet. Do you think that's what she did?"
"That's what she would have liked to do," I said. That wasn't a lie.
He nodded. "Wherever she is, she's got to be a very frightened young lady."
She didn't seem as frightened as he thought. Was that only an act?
"What would make her do such a terrible, terrible thing? I never realized she had that sort of desperation, anger, in her. You never did either, huh?" he asked.
"She didn't like having him as her father. She never called him her father. She's very sad about her real father dying so young. She's always been angry about that, and she never liked that her mother married Harry Pearson." It was all true.
"Understandable," my father said. He smiled at me and shook his head. "Only, that's no reason to take such a violent action against Harry Pearson.-No, my guess is there was something else going on there, something so well hidden not even you, her best friend, knew it. I'm sure it will all come out in the end. It always does. Keeping truth down isn't easy. It has a way of showing up sometime or another." He laughed. "It's like trying to keep a beach ball underwater. Somehow, it slips around your hands and pops up."
We drove to the township police station. Just the sight of it made me tremble. I hoped I didn't look as shaky as I felt when I got out of the car. Before we reached the front door, my father seized my wrist and gently turned me to him
"You want to help Karen, don't you, Zipporah?" "Yes," I said.
"Then tell the truth in there, Zipporah. You can't help her any better than by doing that," he said. "You understand? Don't hold anything back, no matter what. In the end, it's only worse for everyone. Okay?"
His inscrutable grayish blue eyes fixed themselves on me. I swallowed back the lumps that had come into my throat and nodded.
Then we walked in.

I could always tell from the way other people looked at my father and addressed him that he commanded great respect. Just in the relatively short time we had lived in this community, he had been in the newspapers often enough. A feature piece had been done on him after his last court victory, because it involved a lawsuit against the county over some environmental issues. He had taken the case and charged only expenses, because he believed in the importance of protecting the environment. There was already some talk about asking him to run for a political office, but he loved what he did too much to do anything else.

Never having been inside a police station before, I did not know what to expect. From watching old movies and television, I thought I would see prisoners in cells, but it looked more like a
government office, with secretaries and office machinery. Even the woman who I learned later served as a police dispatcher wasn't in a uniform.

There were two detectives waiting with the chief of police when we arrived. My father explained that they came out from state law enforcement agency called the