Waking Hours (22 page)

He remembered a story from his days as a Boy Scout, just one of those campfire tales intended to scare, purportedly from ancient Indian lore, a legend about a shape-shifter who resided in these very woods, a demon who was there one minute and gone the next. The Paykak, Old Whitney had called it. Probably scarier because his scoutmaster was also a funeral director, though he never talked about his profession during scout meetings.

Tommy had bought the premise hook, line, and sinker as a Webelo and had been scared half to death and stayed up until dawn in his tent with the pocketknife his father had given him open in his hand.

But of course, now that he was older and wiser, he knew the story as just that . . . a story and nothing more.

He felt in his pocket for the jackknife all the same. He was older and he was wiser, but he was still human. Something had been there, and then it was gone.

Tommy drove home and considered going back to sleep, but he had too much on his mind. So he went to the gym instead, thinking he might work off some of his excess energy. He arrived at five and disarmed the security system, turned on the lights, dropped three mesh bags of towels down the chute to the laundry, checked to make sure the snack bar was stocked, and then walked the facility to see if there was anything else he needed to attend to.

At the batting cages he saw that someone had left a helmet on home plate in the pros cage. The machines were set to various speeds, ranging from 30 mph in the kiddie cage all the way to 105 mph in the pros.

Tommy entered the cage and bent down to pick up the batting helmet.

As he rose, a reflexive sensation he could only describe as a kind of instinct, a faculty honed on the football field to protect himself from blindside hits, told him something was coming.

He turned his head, reacted in a microsecond, and hit the deck just before a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball zipped past his ear and clanged into the wire backstop. Had the pitch been another inch lower or a few miles an hour faster, he would have been beaned and, at that speed, possibly killed.

He stayed low and crept out of the line of fire, but the pitching machine at the other end of the cage was now still, a red light showing instead of green. He listened. He was alone in the building. He approached the far end of the cage carefully along the side wall, opened the door to the maintenance area, and felt the pitching machine. It was warm. Someone had left it on all night.

He shut it off, grabbed an Out of Order sign from where it hung from a peg on the wall, reentered the batting cage, and hung the sign from the front of the machine. He picked up the ball, which had rolled back down the gutter to the reloading chute. Nothing about it seemed at all unusual, except that it had just tried to kill him.

“What did I ever do to you?” he asked the ball.

Then he heard something, distant and impossible to locate. He’d turned up the heat in the building. It could have been a radiator making the sound of someone laughing.

He was fooling himself.

“Allow for the possibility that evil is real,”
Carl had said.

Allowing for that possibility in as open-minded a way as he could, Tommy concluded that something evil was trying to kill him, possibly the same person who killed Julie Leonard. But it was also possible that it wasn’t a person. The thing in the woods. The batting machine. He’d been fearless on the football field, but he couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see or understand.

Suddenly, he wasn’t feeling fearless anymore.

20
.

Dani checked her calendar, then called Willis Dane’s home number and told his caregiver she’d have time to see him Wednesday afternoon.

She made toast for breakfast and then called Tommy. She’d wanted to tell him what she’d learned regarding Jalen Simmons and his copycat voice mail as soon as she’d learned about it, but of course it was the middle of the night. She told him that Logan Gansevoort’s lawyer, Davis Fish, was still being uncooperative, as was St. Adrian’s Academy.

“I’ve gotta run—have an appointment with the guidance counselor at ESH,” she told him. Later she intended to talk with Julie Leonard’s mom and sister and with Amos Kasden’s parents, and she hoped Tommy would come along and provide a second point of view.

“Great,” she said when he agreed. “I’ll pick you up at All-Fit in an hour.”

East Salem High consistently ranked in the top-ten high schools in New York, despite chronic budget wrangling and school board politics and hirings and firings. Fed by four elementary schools and two middle schools, the school had a predominantly white upper-middle-class student body and had developed a reputation for excellent athletics and strong programs in the creative arts, theater, music, and writing.

To Dani, the hallways seemed weirdly unchanged. The display case in the lobby outside the main office had been decorated in Halloween themes by the Debate Club, black cats and pumpkins and black construction paper silhouettes of owls saying
whom
instead of
who
. On the wall beside it, a map of the world showed the places where senior class projects had helped build affordable housing or schools or clinics. Dani often found herself defending her hometown where, yes, outsiders correctly observed, there was a great deal of wealth and self-interest, but there were also a lot of good people who gave of their time and money and wanted to make the world a better place.

When she made an appointment with the office, she’d been happily surprised to learn the guidance counselor was a former classmate, Jill Ji-Sung. She’d been a popular cheerleader when Dani was a bookish dweeb.

Jill remembered Dani too and filled her in on the current social scene at East Salem, which was in many ways not so different from when they had attended, but in other ways was unrecognizable. Cell phones. Text messages. Twitter. Facebook, IM chats, Formspring. The same social dynamics prevailed, the rivalries and petty jealousies and mean kids who picked on weak kids, though now there was cyber-bullying to add to all the traditional ways the strong harassed the meek. Julie Leonard was probably among the latter group, according to Jill.

“A bit invisible,” the guidance counselor said, “maybe as a survival strategy. We had an incident last year when somebody wrote an anonymous comment about Julie in one of the girls’ bathrooms. Something about the outfit she was wearing. I called her in and asked her if her feelings were hurt. She said it was just somebody who didn’t know her trying to be funny, and everybody had a right to an opinion. She really tried to see the good in everybody. Not as a goody-two-shoes. Just because that was how she wanted to live.”

That had been Jill’s only contact with Julie Leonard. On the other hand, she had spoken to Logan Gansevoort on numerous occasions, once when drugs were found in his locker and again when a younger boy complained that Logan had snapped him with a wet towel in the locker room.

“I have to say,” Jill confided, “it seemed pretty clear to a lot of us at the time that Logan’s father applied some sort of pressure on the principal or the school superintendent. He got probation where other kids would have been suspended.”

“Do you think he’s capable of violence?” Dani asked.

“He certainly has a sense of entitlement,” Jill said. “And maybe impunity too. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me he keeps pushing the limits precisely because his parents never set any. It’s not that he wants to get caught, but he wants them to set boundaries. Kids who grow up without any think their parents don’t care.”

“Unfortunately, sometimes they’re right.”

“He’s definitely the G-Money around here,” Jill said.

“Speaking of which . . . ,” Dani said, then described how she’d come into contact with Tommy Gunderson after not seeing him for nearly a dozen years. He seemed the same, Dani said, then corrected herself. “Actually, he seems better. More mature. ’Course, most of us are more mature at thirty than we were at eighteen . . . one hopes.”

“He had such a crush on you,” Jill said. “When he told everybody he knew they had to vote for you but that you’d kill him if you ever found out, I was sure you guys were going to end up in a big house on Willow Pond with lots of little homecoming princes and princesses.”

Dani thanked the guidance counselor and left before she blushed red enough to set off the smoke alarms. Outside, she took a moment to recover. It had never dawned on her that Tommy Gunderson had felt anything but sorry for her in high school, if she ever crossed his mind at all. He’d asked people to vote for her? Really?

Today Tommy was wearing hiking boots, khaki cargo pants, and a leather bomber-style jacket over a white shirt. She wondered if he even owned a tie, and suppressed a fleeting desire to take him shopping.

He was sitting on the curb outside the gym, but jumped to his feet when Dani pulled up. He ran a hand along the hood of her car as he walked to the passenger side.

“Where we going first?” he asked, getting in her car.

“To see the Kasdens. Amos’s parents. Then Julie’s mom,” she told him. “Phil Casey talked to her, but he thought it would be a good idea if we did too. The Kasdens live right in town.”

“I know,” Tommy said. “Mitchell Kasden is my dad’s dentist. Dad was having a good night last night, memory-wise. He said he remembered once when Mitchell came into the nursery. He had a kid with him who kept pulling the heads off the flowers. That was Amos.”

“Interesting.”

“How so?” Tommy asked, pausing to shut off his cell phone.

It occurred to Dani that none of the men she’d ever seen socially did that. She had Tommy’s undivided attention.

“Kids who torture animals often turn into very troubled adults,” Dani said. “I’m not sure if decapitating flowers counts. It’s not dissimilar.”

“She hates me, she hates me not,” Tommy said. “I was actually at the library looking up stories about people who tortured dogs. Did I tell you I walked the back trail up Bull’s Rock Hill last night and found a tree stump full of blood?”