What Has Become of You (33 page)

 • • • 

Back at the police station once again, Vera was led into the same claustrophobic interrogation room she’d been in previously. In true Ferreira style, he cut to the heart of the issue and broke through the glaze of her dissociation—that tired, disembodied, almost drunken feeling that had begun to overtake her again. “What have you heard about Ritchie Ouelette and the Angela Galvez murder?” he fired at her as soon as she’d sat down.

“Only what little they printed in the newspaper,” Vera said, and she recapitulated what she remembered from the brief article.

“So you know we have a different suspect in custody now. A minor.”

Vera nodded.

“I’ve brought you here this morning because there’s something I’d like you to hear. This is not something we’ve shared with anyone else outside the department except for Jensen’s parents hearing a little. I want you to listen, and there’s no need to comment until you’re spoken to, got it?”

“Got it.”

“Here’s the context so far as we know it. Short and sweet. This seventeen-year-old punk kid shows up at the station the other day, copping to all kinds of stuff, including the murder of Angela Galvez. After we cracked down on him for a day and a half, we got him to confess to the Ahmed killing, too. What you’re about to hear is only a small part of that confession.”

Him,
Vera thought, exhaling with a sense of relief. So the voice on the tape, the underage confessor, was not Jensen Willard. Why, then, would the police want to share it with her? She leaned toward the tape player, which the detective had placed between them, resting the weight of her upper body on her elbows and propping her fists under her chin, her eyes shut tight so as to listen without distraction.

The detective hit the
PLAY
button, and the room welled up with the husky voice of a very young boy. His words sounded a little muffled, and Vera could not tell if this was due to the poor quality of the recording or if the speaker was in the throes of a head cold.

“When Angela Galvez died, it was just something that happened. I was kind of made to do it on the spot. I didn’t have anything against that kid personally. For months before that I’d been getting pressured to see what I was made of. To see if I could take a life, just to prove that I could, and to prove that something like life and death really doesn’t matter.”

Vera heard Ferreira’s voice on the tape then: “And who was pressuring you, to see what you were made of?”

“The girl I was with.”

“And the girl was Jensen Willard, wasn’t it?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“You killed Jensen, too, didn’t you, Frank? You know there’s no logical way your brother can take the heat for this one.”

“No, I didn’t kill her. I don’t know where she is now. She just took off.”

“Took off where?”

“She just took off, like I said. We got as far as New York City together, and then she was just gone.”

“But she didn’t make it to New York City, Frank. She didn’t get there because you killed her before you ever left Dorset. We found her combat boots by the riverside.”

A feeling began to uncoil in Vera’s stomach—the sick feeling of some hibernating creature, like an ancient slumbering eel stirring within her guts. She looked at Detective Ferreira, her lips starting to form a question, but the detective gave her a look that warned her to hold off.

“If I killed her, why would I leave her boots behind? That doesn’t even make any sense. Drain the river, I guarantee you won’t find her. She left those boots there herself to make it look like she was dead. I lent her a pair of my Chucks, and I gave her my hat to hide her hair under so people wouldn’t recognize her right off.”

“So you say. We can get back to that a little later. Let’s review what you said about Sufia Ahmed. Or are you going to tell us Jensen Willard pressured you to do that, too?”

“I got nothing to say about that.”

“But you already have, Frank. You admitted in your statement earlier that you killed Sufia.”

Vera heard a sigh and a long, staticky pause.

“She had a plan for it, that’s all. Jensen wanted to do three killings, and she was thinking maybe with the second one we could make it look like this teacher of hers had something to do with it—this dumb substitute teacher who was all into murder and stuff. We didn’t get very far with that, though.”

The detective turned off the tape. “No prize for guessing who the dumb teacher is,” he said.

“Me?” Vera, who had not breathed for the last thirty seconds, shuddered at how her voice came out sounding: thick, husky—not unlike the boy’s on the tape.

“Bingo. Do you recognize the speaker at all, Vera?”

“No. My God, should I?”

“Not necessarily. I just wonder where Jensen Willard and this kid would get the idea to try to implicate you. If you give me a sec, I’d like to show you something we received shortly after the Willard girl went missing.”

The detective took out his phone and tapped the screen a few times until he found what he wanted. He held it out for Vera to examine, and she squinted at an image of blurred text that looked like it might have been photographed from a microfilm screen. “I can’t read that,” she said. “Is there any way to enlarge it?” She was glad the detective did not invite her to hold the phone herself, for her hands were trembling so badly that she was sure she would have dropped it.

Ferreira adjusted the image until the text popped into Vera’s view.
HUNDREDS MOURN HEIDI
, the old newspaper headline read, and Vera remembered the photo that had accompanied it: two students from her high school, hugging each other, their faces exaggerated caricatures of grief. The rest of the old article was there, too—the coverage of Heidi Duplessis’s funeral, and Vera’s infamous quote toward the end of the article:
People are acting like no one ever died before. But really, death is just a part of life.

“Oh my
God
,” Vera said again. “Why would someone send you this awful old thing?”

“Beats me. We already knew about what you said. I know you don’t believe it, but we do our homework. The question is why someone else would want to bring our attention to it. Among other reasons, it was just one more mandate to keep a close eye on you. We couldn’t trace where the text came from because the sender had a disposable phone, but guess who didn’t throw away his disposable phone? We found this same image in the kid’s stored photos when we took him into custody.”

“Who
is
this kid, though? Can you at least tell me who he is?”

“His name is Frank Ouelette Jr.” The detective waited a beat, and then, before Vera could ask, supplied the rest. “Ritchie’s little brother.”

Vera sank back in her chair. “Wow” was all she could say.

Ferreira took in Vera’s reaction with what she thought was grim relish. “Quite the heartwarming family story this is. Ever since Ritchie’s been trying to raise his brother on his own, the kid’s been a mess. Dropped out of school, spent some time in a psych ward for a half-assed suicide attempt, disappears for weeks at a time. One day this kid comes into the police station of his own volition, confessing that he’d let his brother take the heat for Angela Galvez.”

Vera shook her head. “I’m not seeing where I fit in here.”

“Ouelette and your student Willard were schoolmates for a very brief period. Where you ‘fit in,’ as you put it, is not entirely clear, but if you don’t know this Ouelette kid, chances are he learned about you from the girl.”

“But do you really think . . . do you really think Jensen isn’t alive? You really think this Frank might have killed her? I find that almost impossible to believe.” Vera dug clumsily around in her tote bag, feeling under layers of cosmetics and pajamas and bus ticket stubs until she found the two stolen library books and the J. D. Salinger postcard she’d found within one of them. Handing the postcard over to Ferreira, she said, “I’m pretty sure this is Jensen’s handwriting. I found this in New York City just a couple of days ago. And it wasn’t the first message I got from her.” She relayed the earlier message she had received back at headquarters. “I couldn’t prove she wrote the first one, but once I saw this one, I knew the author had to be one and the same.”

“So this is what you were doing in New York,” the detective said, looking at the postcard from every angle, then turning it back to its front and giving Salinger a second appraisal. Taking in the herringbone tweed coat and narrow tie, he snorted. “We’ll check it out. For now, though, just so we’re clear, I’m putting it on the record that you don’t recognize this kid’s voice. And I take it you’ve never heard Jensen Willard say anything about being friends with a Frank Ouelette Jr.”

“Definitely not. Not in her journals or elsewhere.”

“There’s just one more thing, then. The kid has asked if he can speak to you personally.”

“To
me
? What for?”

“Says he won’t be right with his
conscience
if he doesn’t.” The detective uttered the word
conscience
with an inflection that told Vera he doubted that Frank Ouelette Jr. even had one. “He’d have his lawyer present, and I’d be there with you, too. But this is only going to happen if you’re willing to do a little jail trip later this afternoon. Today’s the last day we can hold him, and after he goes home for a while, there’s no telling if he’ll change his mind about wanting to talk. Ever visited a jail before, Vera?”

When Vera stammered that no, she never had, the detective handed her a brochure and told her she might find it handy:
WHAT TO EXPECT DURING YOUR FIRST PRISON VISIT
, read the boldfaced heading on its cover. “To sum it up,” Ferreira said, “no sharps, no weapons, nothing that’s going to give you a hard time going through a metal detector. Leave your purse at home unless you want to pay to have it put in a locker. No phones, no cameras. No low-cut blouses or short skirts.”

“No low-cut blouses or short skirts?” Even in her state of relative shock, Vera could not keep the irony out of her voice.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it? Come to think of it, whatever you wear, bring a sweater. A big, baggy, frumpy one—just in case.”

 • • • 

As Vera waited in her studio for Ferreira to pick her up later that afternoon, she changed into her longest black skirt and a drab, oversized crew-neck sweater, but she could not refrain from fussing with her hair and dabbing on some dark lipstick. She had tried to rest, per the detective’s suggestion (“Get a couple hours of sleep—you look like shit” had been his piquant way of putting it), but had found that as tired as she was, she could not rest. Her mind kept crackling with agitation and confusion as it reviewed the morning’s new information, which seemed to cast its particular, cruel new light on everything that Vera had assumed about her student Jensen Willard.

Her mind wanted to reject it all. The girl may be dark, even darker than Bret Folger knew her to be, but she could not imagine her coercing anyone into murder. She thought of the girl’s journal entries—so often funny, self-effacing, filled with adolescent pathos and precocious intelligence. True, she had given Vera occasion for fear and doubt more than once, but the accusations leveled by Frank Ouelette Jr. had to be false.
Had
to be. She wanted nothing more than to look the boy right in the eye and see this lie for herself.

The county jail had the musty smell of a basement or a high school locker room—a smell that hit Vera’s nostrils as soon as she passed through its doors. After being checked by the security guard, she followed Ferreira down the hall and into an elevator, willing herself into feeling more
present
as Ferreira, having spoken to another guard and exchanged some paperwork, escorted her into a private room. “You want some coffee?” the short, stocky female guard who had led them down the hall asked. “They should be along in a couple of minutes.”

“Coffee would be nice,” Vera said mechanically.

A moment later, Vera sipped from the Styrofoam cup she’d been given—black, rotgut stuff, but she did not dare ask if there was any creamer to be had—while Ferreira talked on his phone with someone in a lackadaisical way as though she were not there. He answered his phone two more times and made one call of his own before Frank Ouelette Jr. and his entourage came into the room.

Vera saw the two adults who accompanied Frank before she saw the boy himself. One was a corrections officer in full uniform, and the other was a woman in a misshapen suit with shoulder pads; Vera guessed she must be the attorney. Frank Ouelette Jr., standing between these two people, looked very small.

He was lithe and slightly built, not much taller than Vera, with none of his brother Ritchie’s impressive height. He had a rounded, elvish face and sandy brown hair that sprang around his face in curls. His clear blue eyes were the one feature that bore a trace of his older brother; they were the sort of eyes one thinks of as honest, with a thick, arching sweep of eyebrows above them. He was, in Vera’s opinion, a rather handsome boy—or would have been if he had not looked so abjectly uncomfortable.

“Frank, this is Vera Lundy. Vera, Frank Ouelette Jr.,” Detective Ferreira said. To Vera’s surprise, the boy extended a hand to her—cool, pale, and fine-boned. She had thought he would be handcuffed; she had imagined him with his arms behind his back like a boy about to offer her a secret bouquet of freshly picked wildflowers, though common sense told her that his hands would be handcuffed in the front, if he had any restraints at all. She took his hand in hers and was unsure later if she had actually grasped it back when he shook it; nor could she remember letting go. Was this the hand that had strangled Angela Galvez? Sufia Ahmed?

“Thanks for coming,” the boy said. His voice was the voice she had heard on the tape—young-sounding, with a throat that sounded full of tears but wasn’t.

The attorney, whose name Vera quickly forgot as soon as it was shared with her, seemed as uncomfortable as a mother whose son has been called into the principal’s office. She leaned toward her client and blinked with mistrust at Ferreira and Vera from behind her large-framed eyeglasses. Vera guessed her to be fairly green in her profession.