Waking Hours (27 page)

Dani read the letter, then scanned it into her computer and forwarded copies of it to Detective Casey, Stuart Metz, Irene Scotto, and Tommy.

Tommy e-mailed her back thirty minutes later:

Dani,

Spoke with Liam this morning, like you asked. Had a good talk. I think he was being quite honest with me. Three things.

        1. He says he’s not close friends with Logan, nobody is, but that if you want to be where things are happening (party with the cool kids, etc.), Logan is inevitably there. Liam remembers a time he and Logan took M80 firecrackers and blew up a dead fish. Not sure that counts as cruelty to animals.

        2. Told him about how we’d found the exchange of messages on Julie’s Facebook page and how Kara told us Julie had a crush on him and he broke her heart. As for the crush part, he said he didn’t have any idea what Kara was talking about, and I do not believe he was lying. I’m guessing she was throwing herself at him and he was oblivious, and she went home crying.

        3. As for the Facebook notes, it’s not what we thought. Liam had a band and Julie wanted to try out to be the singer after she saw a notice he put up on the bulletin board at school. She tried out for the band, and according to Liam, she was terrible. Liam was trying not to hurt Julie’s feelings so he didn’t tell her the reason they picked someone else. That was why she asked him on Facebook, “Why?”

See you later today.
Tommy

p.s. my car blew up.
p.p.s. remind me to tell you something else

“What do you mean, ‘P.S. my car blew up’?” Dani said, trying to keep her voice to a whisper. “You can’t just say to somebody, ‘P.S. my car blew up’! How did your car blow up?”

She’d asked Tommy to meet her for lunch at the Miss Salem Diner, an old-fashioned railroad-style eatery on Main Street at the southwest corner of the town square. While she’d waited for him, Dani noticed a change. Eating at the Miss Salem had always been a special treat when she was little, on the rare occasion when her mother was away or busy and it was up to her father to supply the nourishment. Later, the diner became the teen hangout where she’d meet her girlfriends for burgers and gossip. One summer she’d even worked there as a waitress.

It was ordinarily a place of lively discussion, energy, cheer. Today people looked different. They spoke low so as not to be overheard, glanced nervously whenever someone entered, or fidgeted anxiously, rolling their napkins into balls. There was tension in the air, as unmistakable as the aroma of onions frying on the grill. Dani wondered if her sweet little town would ever get back to normal.

“My mechanic friend thinks it was a stuck float in the carburetor,” Tommy said. “That’s the chance you take when you restore a car with aftermarket parts. It was only a Mustang.”

“The one you drove in high school?” Dani said.

“Not the exact same car, but same year,” Tommy said. “The one I had in high school was a Boss. This was a Mach 1.”

“What happened to the one you had in high school?”

“Senior year I bet Gerry Roebling that I could beat him in a race around Lake Atticus. The loser had to sign over the title to the winner.”

“What?” Dani asked. “There’s no road that goes all the way around Lake Atticus.”

“You don’t need one in January,” he told her. “The lake was frozen. Just not frozen enough.”

“You went through the ice?”

“Uh-huh,” Tommy said. “But at least I wasn’t the owner of a car at the bottom of a lake.”

“Why didn’t he go through the ice?”

“He was on a motorcycle,” Tommy said. “Good thing too, or I wouldn’t have had a ride home. As I was saying about teenage boys doing stupid things . . . it’s more than a theory. It’s the hormones.”

“No, it’s not,” Dani said. “Boys are just stupid. Don’t argue. I’m a doctor.”

“Anyway,” Tommy continued, “Liam said Blair thought it was Julie who supplied the zombie juice, not Logan. When are we going to get to talk to Logan? Or Amos? By the way—the letter Amos sent you doesn’t sound like him.”

“How would you know what he sounds like?”

“I don’t,” Tommy said, “but I thought Amos was supposed to be smart. The letter sounds like a nine-year-old wrote it. You remember Arkady Dimitrikos from East Salem Elementary?”

“The kid who came from Greece?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “Didn’t speak a word of English. Everybody thought he was stupid. And you remember how he turned out.”

“He won the Scripps National Spelling Bee,” Dani said.

“He learned English with a vengeance. Plus, Julie was maybe five one or two,” Tommy said. “And in the photograph from Liam’s phone that you showed me, Amos is standing next to her, and he’s about the same height. So say he comes here from Russia without speaking any English, and he’s small, and really smart, and he gets thrown into a public school where kids think he’s stupid because he can’t speak English and they pick on him because he’s smaller than everybody else. How is he
not
going to learn English? That letter sounds like somebody else wrote it. Or coached him. In my humble opinion.”

Tommy’s humble opinions were worth more than he realized, Dani thought.

“Also,” Tommy added, “Liam said they made audition videos of everybody who tried out for his band, and Julie’s was so bad that one of the guys wanted to post it to YouTube as a joke. Liam deleted it before he could. Just to show you how Liam meant her no harm. And guess who was in the band? Parker Bowen and Terence Walker.”

“Not Logan?”

“Doesn’t play an instrument and can’t sing.”

“That describes half the people on MTV.”

“How was your day?” he asked. “How’s your sister doing with the horses allergic to hay?”

“Oy,” Dani said. “It’s not allergies. Somehow they got infested with botflies. They lay their eggs on the horses’ legs, and then the horses bite their legs where they itch and the larvae get in the horses’ noses and they sneeze.”

She recalled a boy in Africa who’d been horribly infested by
Dermatobia hominis
, a botfly that used humans, in addition to a variety of other animals, as hosts. The larvae grew under the boy’s skin until it looked like he was covered in boils.

“You hungry?” Tommy asked, setting the menu aside.

Most townies ignored the menu, Dani recalled from her time as a waitress, because it hadn’t changed in twenty years.

“I was a minute ago,” she said, setting her own menu down. “Caesar salad with grilled chicken on the side.”

She felt a comfortable familiarity talking to Tommy. She no longer felt like she needed to impress him, or keep him at arm’s length. It helped to be sitting in the old town diner where she’d spent so many hours talking to friends or reading in a corner booth.

He slid the menu away from him, then smiled at her. “Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face?”

“Your face is fine.”

“So’s yours. Except for the weird expression on it.”

“Jill Ji-Sung said you told people to vote for me for homecoming queen.”

Tommy looked caught, guilty. “Well,” he protested, “it’s not like I thought you couldn’t win it on your own . . .”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dani said. “And you’re wrong. Lindsay Cameron would have won easily. I’m not mad at you. I was just wondering why you did it.”

“Because I thought you were the best person in the school,” he said. “And the prettiest. From the eyes up at least.”

“Excuse me?” Dani said.

“That’s all I ever saw,” Tommy said. “Your face was always buried in a book.” He held a hand horizontal and flat in front of his face to illustrate. “This was you,” he said, raising his hand to cover his nose. “Book, eyebrows, top of head. I was scared of you.”

“Maybe I was hiding. Why in the world were you scared of me?”

“Because you were so awesome,” Tommy said. “I felt totally out of my league around you.”

Dani wanted to ask him if he’d had a crush on her—if he’d felt the same thing on the dance floor that she’d felt, or if she’d been deluding herself— but she couldn’t decide what would be more awkward, if he said yes or if he said no. She was about to change the subject when the waitress came to take their orders.

“Okay,” she said once the waitress was gone. “Another question. You said there was a reason you wanted to be a private eye, but that you’d tell me later. It’s later.”

She immediately saw that her question made him uncomfortable. “Unless you’d rather not.”

“No, it’s okay,” Tommy said. “Do you remember when my mom died when we were in eighth grade? The car accident on the Taconic?”

“I remember,” Dani said. “We were all shocked. Didn’t she hit a deer?”

“She wasn’t driving, but her boss did,” Tommy said, tracing the grain of the wooden tabletop with his finger. “They were at a Housing and Urban Development conference in Mahopec. She was in administration.”

“If this is too painful . . .”

“No, it’s fine,” Tommy said. “Like you said about time healing things. I was fourteen. That’s a long time ago.”

The waitress brought their drinks. Tommy added cream to his coffee and tore open two packets of sweetener, shaking them first in a gesture that reminded Dani of how her father shook the mercury thermometer before taking her temperature.

“So I went to the funeral,” Tommy said, “and it was pretty terrible. But afterward something just wasn’t sitting right with me. The way people were looking at me, like there was something they weren’t telling me. I don’t know. Something felt wrong. So I started doing some investigating, like I’m a big TV show private eye . . . like I’m Magnum, I guess. And I learned the accident happened on the northbound lane, up near Chatham. Where her boss had a vacation house. At ten minutes before midnight. Chatham is about fifty miles north of Mahopec. So why were they going to Chatham, to his country house, at midnight?”

“Oh, Tommy,” Dani said.

“I found some e-mails she’d written him on her computer,” Tommy said. “Part of me didn’t want to know, but the rest of me had to. It was pretty obvious they were having an affair. My dad didn’t know anything about it.”

“Did you ever tell him?”

“What would be the point?” Tommy said. “I deleted the e-mails. Actually, I trashed the whole CPU with a sledgehammer so he’d never find them. Or maybe he knew all about it but never let on because he didn’t want me to know. He loved her the way he knew how, but that wasn’t the way she needed to be loved. That’s the best I can do.”

“How did it hit you when you figured it out?” Dani asked.

“Hard,” Tommy said. “I used to picture her boss’s face on the chests of the running backs I’d tackle. I had all this anger, and it was like I had a switch I could flip, on/off, and when I needed to hit somebody, I’d just flip it on and go.”

“Is it still there?” Dani asked. “The switch?”

What she really wanted to know was, had he flipped the switch the night he tackled Dwight Sykes?

“Do I have to answer that?” he said. “It is. But I haven’t flipped it in a while. The guy had actually been to our house for dinner. He and my dad were friends. But you know, his wife and kids didn’t deserve to be hurt either. The worst part, for me anyway, is remembering all those happy moments together as a family, the three of us, and wondering if it was all a lie.”