Locust Lane(59)
“She’d been struggling with drug addiction.”
“Well, damn.”
“The situations aren’t really equivalent, I guess.”
“Dead is dead. That seems pretty equivalent to me. How old was she?”
“Twenty. Same as Eden.”
He met her eye. This lost man.
“What was her name?”
“Gabriella. Gabi.”
“That’s nice.”
“As is Eden. How did you come up with that?”
“I thought, you know, innocence. I was young. I didn’t take into consideration the whole apple and snake deal.”
He took a sip. She looked at her wine. It brought to mind a urine sample. She left it where it was.
“So that’s why you gave me your card?”
He finished his drink.
“You want another?”
“I probably should go ahead and take my first sip of this one.”
He headed off for his refill. Once again, she watched him at the bar. If this were a date, he’d have been the best-looking man she’d ever been out with. Also the wealthiest. And the nicest. She thought about that, a date with Patrick Noone. He’d spend two hundred dollars on dinner and be a gentleman when he said good night and then she’d have rushed home so she could tell Eden all about it. But this wasn’t a date and she wasn’t going to be rushing home to talk to her daughter ever again.
When he returned she resisted the urge to fill up the silence. The man had his own rhythms that she knew better than to disturb. They half-listened to that song about Sister Christian as it gargled inside the nearest speaker.
“You’ll hear her voice.”
She had to run what he’d just said through her mind a few times to make sure she’d heard it right.
“Okay,” she said.
“Has that happened yet?”
Danielle knew that if she said anything at that moment, she might lose control. So she simply shook her head.
“You will. She won’t say anything important. I mean, she won’t tell you who killed her. No lottery numbers. It’ll just be normal stuff.”
“I could probably live with that.”
“That’s why I was out there that night, driving around. I was asleep and then I heard Gabi ask me to come pick her up. I mean, obviously I knew it wasn’t real. But it … unsettled me.”
“So it was a dream.”
“Not really. Her voice didn’t come from inside the sleep, if that makes sense. It came from somewhere else. And no, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Danielle was wishing this didn’t all seem so goddamned plausible.
“The funny thing was, her voice wasn’t like it had been when she was alive. At least not those bad last years. But she wasn’t a kid, either. It was like what it would have been now.”
He was still staring at his empty glass. Finally, he looked up at her.
“So. After I hit the dog. I saw someone.”
Suddenly, everything in the bar became a lot clearer and a lot quieter.
“What do you mean, you saw someone?”
“When I got out of the car to check on the dog. There was a person there. In the trees at the edge of the property. I tried to speak with him but he didn’t answer. He just stood there. Like he was trying to be invisible. And then the dog attacked and … when I checked again he was gone.”
“Was it Christopher Mahoun?”
“Well, see, that’s the thing. It wasn’t.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“I’m pretty sure it was a kid named Jack Parrish.”
Friday
ALICE
She called the Twitter account Emerson Depths. For her icon, she used a photo she’d found of the quaint wooden sign outside the Emerson Heights T stop. She was careful to cover her tracks while setting it up. She used a dummy email for verification; she turned off location services. Geoff had set up a VPN for her after they got married, so she didn’t have to worry about anybody tracking her IP address. It would take a boatload of court orders to discover this was her. If it got to that point, she’d have already accomplished her goal.
The thread consisted of seven tweets. She labored long and hard over the first one to make it just right.
“Anybody who thinks Jack Parrish was an innocent bystander on the night Eden Perry was killed should know that he privately admitted to sexual misconduct with a female Waldo student last year.”
After that, the story wrote itself. She simply stuck to the facts, with a few embellishments here and there. It was an impressive bill of particulars. An incident in a boy’s bedroom. A terrified girl a long way from home. An enraged mother. Ethnicity and class. Thousands in hush money. An NDA, signed and sealed. And now, it was happening again.
Although she wrote the thread late Thursday night, she waited to post it until just before seven Friday morning, when her target audience would be starting the day. She tagged four gossip super-spreaders. Milly Williams, Cassandra Nilsen-Shapiro, Jean Feddes, and the Emerson High Drama Club. Alice wanted to make sure she covered all her bases. This thing needed to get out there fast. A half hour later, the thread had been viewed over five hundred times. There were likes and retweets. Progress would soon be exponential. It was unstoppable.