Fatality Read online

  Anjelica lifted her head briefly.

  “Who is Frannie?” asked Rose.

  “Business partner. They’ve been together ten years and they’ve never had a nice conversation. All they do is yell. We can probably hear from here. Want something to eat? There’s lots of food.”

  The girls knelt on the floor to look in a tiny fridge where there were cold soft drinks and some grapes. A wicker basket lined with checked red cotton held fat bakery cookies and triangular pastries. A grocery bag overflowed with chip selections.

  Pipe smoke had settled toward the floor and Rose coughed. “I’m not hungry,” she said, returning to her seat.

  Anjelica, still kneeling, tore open a bag of blue corn chips.

  Rose, did Mr. Lofft go inside the house?

  I don’t know.

  Did you go inside the house?

  No.

  Rose, did you hear the argument between Mr. Lofft and Ms. Bailey?

  I can’t remember.

  Rose, it’s important. Try to remember.

  I think Anjelica and I were having a snack. I think she opened blue corn chips.

  What time did you arrive at the lake estate?

  After dark.

  Did Mr. Lofft stop for any other errands or any other reason?

  Traffic, I think. There was a lot of traffic.

  Did you have dinner with Mr. Lofft?

  I don’t remember.

  It was this answer that made the police so unwilling to believe Rose. The police said that a twelve-year-old could have been so busy giggling with her girlfriend that she paid no attention to the ride; okay, they could live with that. But dinner at so impressive an estate as Milton Lofft’s? It must have been exciting and memorable. She could not have forgotten her welcome dinner at a mansion literally five times the size of her own home.

  But in fact there had been no dinner, just a lot of food laid out on a long counter that gleamed like a waxed car. Cold salads with bright, unusual greens; a leg of lamb, sliced and steaming; beautifully garnished unknown hot dishes; a cold chicken surrounded by lemon slices; hot breads in twists and braids; cheese and fruit in artistic arrangements.

  “Eat whenever you want,” said Anjelica. “Like on a cruise ship.”

  “Don’t you sit down together?” asked Rose.

  “Only if we have guests.” Anjelica apparently did not think of Rose as a guest, just a person who was there. Never glancing at the nutritional food, Anjelica helped herself to a slice of the richest, most lavishly iced and decorated chocolate cake Rose had ever seen, and wandered off with her plate.

  And like a cruise ship, the place featured lots of activities. Rose discovered in the course of the weekend that she could watch a movie in the entertainment room, swim in the heated indoor pool, swim in the heated outdoor pool. Enjoy the game room, the craft room, the book room. Sit in the solarium, visit the orchid greenhouse, ride horses, play with the new litter of puppies in the kennels.

  There weren’t, however, lots of people. Half the time, she couldn’t even find Anjelica or Mr. Lofft. Rose kept feeling that if she just went around one more corner, she would find the party, but she never did.

  Now the cop’s voice tightened. His brittle anger yanked Rose into the present. “Rose, a good kid with an outstanding academic record doesn’t lightly steal a police car. In fact, darn few people, no matter what their grades in school, have ever committed that particular crime. And darn few people actually stay silent, Rose. People love to be at the center of things, talking away, being important. You can’t come up with a single detail about two and a half days at a billionaire’s lake estate? Rose, I have some photographs I want you to see. I want you to see the dead woman’s body. It wasn’t found for several days, you know. I want you to see it swollen and grotesque and covered with maggots and know that you are protecting the person who did this to her.”

  “No!” cried her father, voice strangled in his throat. He backed himself and Rose against the wall to prevent his daughter from having to look at such photographs. He was trembling. “But Rose, honey,” he said, and the whole room had to stop breathing in order to hear him talk, because his voice was so papery thin, “if you saw a murder, how could you go on to play games, and drive antique cars, and laugh with another little girl? I can’t believe you’re so callous and yet I don’t know how to believe anything else. I have to agree with the police. You must have witnessed something you are refusing to tell us. Or why destroy what you wrote about that weekend, and only that weekend?”

  His faith in Rose as a good person was cracking. His faith in himself as a good parent was cracking.

  Rose shivered with what she had done to them all.

  And then reminded herself that she was not the one who had done it.

  Mr. Travis—finally acting like a lawyer—said that enough was enough. They would return the following day to meet with the juvenile court judge.

  “Tomorrow?” said Rose dizzily.

  Surely she had heard on some TV news show that it was a real scandal the way people had to wait weeks and months for their trials to be scheduled. How could they possibly fit Rose in the very next day? Why couldn’t she be part of this scheduling scandal and have to wait weeks and months?

  Anyway, she had school.

  The police read her mind. “This is not so much a car-stealing case as a murder case, Rose. They’ll fit you in right away. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

  Chapter Four

  BUT NO MATTER HOW much explaining Rose Lymond |had to do, she didn’t do any of it.

  Dinner was just awful.

  She was so stunned by what she had done that she could hardly lift her fork.

  Her parents were so stunned by what she had done that they could barely keep from throwing their forks. They had only one question. What is this all about?

  She had only one answer. Nothing.

  Rose did not sleep but trembled on the surface of sleep.

  Darkness and night, which she usually loved, seemed full of the monsters of childhood.

  For breakfast, she had a single piece of dark toast, lightly buttered. It was bland, but the moment she finished chewing, it churned inside her.

  “Be at the front door of the school at eleven,” said her mother.

  Rose said nothing, and then thought, That way is trouble. So she said, “Mom, I’m truly sorry you and Dad have to deal with this. Don’t be mad, please. I’ll be on time. I promise.” With an effort, she looked into her mother’s eyes and with great effort, kissed her mother’s cheek.

  She fled to the bus. Middle-school kids took a bus and sometimes ninth and tenth graders, but juniors and seniors would rather quit high school than be caught on a bus. They owned a car, their friends owned a car, or their parents drove them. Rose, therefore, was the oldest on her bus. The one who should set the good example.

  So much for that, thought Rose.

  The bus was so crowded that kids sat on each other’s laps. It made for a loud, bruising camaraderie from which nobody could be left out. It was restful to be jammed into so many conversations and bodies.

  In elementary school, Rose had made friends easily. School swarmed with friends: her friends, other people’s friends, future friends. There were kids she did not want to know better and kids she wished she’d never met, but mostly, Rose was surrounded by people she liked. Her whole problem was finding enough time to spend with each of them.

  Then came the terrible interlude of seventh and eighth. There almost wasn’t anything you could call friendship. People weren’t nice enough to be friends. Every few weeks you’d identify a different girl as your best friend, but in actual fact, it was only a girl you didn’t happen to be scornful of at the moment Kids moved through school like fish, flashing through the halls, turning into piranhas to attack one kid, into minnows to follow another.

  Then came freshman year in high school. Kids who had treated Rose like a toxic waste site were nice again. Sophomore year was positively civilized.
Rose knew herself to be popular, or at least cheerfully tolerated.

  Which itself was a problem. Friendship was based on telling everything. She had to face her friends and tell them nothing. Shocked, they would say, You stole a police car? Laughing nervously, they would demand, You tell us every detail! They’d be fascinated. But Rose would have to be silent with them, and unlike parents and police and lawyers and probably the judge, her classmates would not let it go. Silence would be an insult that friendship could not withstand.

  Eighty students clambered out of one bus and Rose Lymond prepared for the onslaught of questions.

  The week after her visit to the Loffts, every acquaintance had lined up, demanding details. Everybody wanted to know if the fabulous estate was really fabulous and the great adventure really something to be jealous of. If Rose had been a clever liar, she would have come up with some great adventure. But all she could say was, Nothing happened.

  By the end of that terrible week, the murder and her possible connection to it had been made known. Now the demands for information were ceaseless, her classmates hoping Rose would be a pivotal witness in a glamorous trial. How disgusted they were with her responses, how unwilling to accept her boring statement. Nothing happened.

  Today, Rose reached her locker before it dawned on her that nobody knew about yesterday. Just because it had shattered her life didn’t mean it had been on TV or radio or in the papers. Just because police lights had swirled in her front yard didn’t mean that neighbors had been home, or noticed, or gossiped. Perhaps the car theft would never be made public, since she was a juvenile and had privacy rights not accorded to adults.

  “Rose!” bellowed Ming. Ming was Chinese, adopted in infancy, and had the smallest bones of anybody in school, but the largest voice. “You didn’t answer my e-mail yesterday!” yelled Ming. “You weren’t sick, were you? You’re never sick.”

  In her lifetime, Rose had not failed to check her messages. Yesterday had been traumatic.

  Emma said, “You know perfectly well her family went somewhere cool and she was too busy for us. We never go anywhere. I want to be born again in your family, Rose.”

  “Did you finish your botany project, Rose?” asked Caitlin. “I had to ask for an extension. I’m dead, because even with an extension, I’m not going to have enough to turn in.”

  She, Rose, academic from her pencil tip to her laptop, had forgotten her homework. She felt unhinged, like a door that no longer closes.

  The girls hurtled into school together, unaware that Rose was not participating in the talk.

  Richard caught up to them. Alex. Keith. And far down the hall, Chrissie was shouldering two huge bags, one for books, one for sports equipment.

  Rose would have written more about Chrissie in the diary than anybody else because they had been best best best friends in elementary school and from habit went on seeing each other in middle. But they had grown apart. Chrissie was ferociously athletic, eager to be a basketball star and play on a winning college team, like UConn or Tennessee. If Chrissie was not practicing layups, she was on the rowing machine or lifting free weights or swimming laps. She also studied fiercely, not because she cared about her subjects but so she’d be referred to as a basketball star taking premed instead of a basketball star taking remedial math.

  Ming was a close friend now but had been just one of the crowd back in seventh. Rose doubted if she had mentioned Ming in the diary. The same was true of Emma and Caitlin.

  She’d written a bit about Jill, a good friend in seventh. But in eighth, where the curriculum was American history, Rose had become fascinated by war. She could not stop reading about battles: half-known Indian conflicts like King Philip’s, major battles like Gettysburg. When Jill saw her reading a book about the Civil War, Jill said, “We finished that, you turkey,” and when Rose said, “I know, but I’m still excited about it,” Jill wandered off, never to return.

  Rose imagined the police gathered around a table at this very moment, reading her diary out loud to each other. Were the police laughing at her? Pitying her? Or were they simply bored?

  Because how exciting was the life of a seventh grader, after all?

  Not very.

  Rose flushed with the knowledge that her diary was packed with references to “A.” She had spent seventh grade having a crush on Alan Finney, the youngest member of Tabor’s band.

  Most of Tabor’s friends had graduated from high school last year along with Tabor, but Alan Finney was a senior this year. Alan had quite literally never looked at Rose, but Rose had spent a large portion of her life looking at Alan. He was always there to look at, too, being a star in as many sports as Tabor had been.

  She imagined the police talking to Alan Finney. Did you know Rose Lymond worships the ground you walk on?

  Alan would have to stop and think. “Rose?” he would say, puzzled. “You mean Tabor’s sister? Come on, gimme a break.”

  Luckily, the police were investigating a murder, not a seventh-grade crush. They had no way to know that Rose continued to carry the crush around with her.

  “Wait up!” shrieked Melinda and Halsey, charging forward to join Ming and Caitlin and Emma and Rose and Richard and Alex and Keith.

  Melinda and Halsey had turned sixteen. Halsey had her own car and loved to give rides to people.

  I’ll probably never have a car and be able to give rides to people, thought Rose. I just stole a car. Mom and Dad are not going to rush me to the Motor Vehicle Bureau for my first license. I might not be driving at sixteen. I might be waiting till I’m twenty-one and in another state.

  “I thought we’d never get here,” said Halsey. “There was so much traffic this morning.”

  Traffic.

  Rose fell back four years.

  Hadn’t the police asked about traffic? The roads had been very crowded that weekend. Mr. Lofft exited from the turnpike to go to Frannie Bailey’s, whose house was remarkably remote for a place technically just north of the city. He took turn after confusing turn, the house finally revealed between a ravine and a protected marsh.

  By the time he and Frannie Bailey finished their shouting match and Mr. Lofft had stomped back to the car, it was five-thirty, and there were still sixty miles to drive. They were in the thick of Friday evening weekend travel and the city streets were maddeningly slow. Mr. Lofft yelled at Anjelica for chomping so loudly on the blue corn chips. Yelled again when Anjelica rolled the crinkly foil up to close the bag.

  Biting down on his half-smoked cigar, Mr. Lofft surged forward a few feet as if to drive through the car ahead of him. He swore at people who didn’t jump lights and swore at people who did. He yelled at the local government for not planning intersections better and yelled at the world for not giving him his own lane.

  They moved ahead two car lengths and the light went red again. He threw the cigar out the window in disgust.

  Anjelica whispered, “Don’t worry. He’s always this upset after he fights with Frannie.”

  At last, the turnpike entrance lay visible in the distance. Mr. Lofft gunned the engine and they sped under the overhanging branches of big trees, driving half on the grass to pass cars waiting to make left turns, bumping over curbs and gutters, the bulky vehicle feeling as if it might tip; but it didn’t, and Mr. Lofft accelerated up the entrance ramp and shot onto the highway at eighty miles an hour.

  Rose clung to the seat in front of her but it was Anjelica who cried out. Mr. Lofft swore at his daughter and drove even more erratically. His mood did not improve. He made them turn off the movie. He turned off his book tape and tuned the radio to an all-news AM station. It repeated itself every quarter hour until Rose could lip-synch the headlines.

  “Lemme see your botany project,” said Richard.

  “Huh?” said Rose.

  “Your phragmites data,” said Richard patiently. ‘You were going to print it out for me, remember?”

  She did not remember agreeing to print out her data. She hardly even remembered Richard.
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  Rose’s love had turned this year from history to science. A botany assignment had changed her life. The teacher was having them experiment with an aggressive swamp weed called phragmites: a fifteen-foot-high invader taking over every native marsh. Rose had come up with a root inoculant that crippled but did not destroy her stand of phragmites. She put her mind on swamp reeds but it wouldn’t stay.

  She found herself having trouble breathing, as if she had asthma. There had been a girl in seventh, known to Rose only by sight, who had actually died of asthma, sitting in the car next to her own mother as they drove to the emergency room, not knowing this attack was worse than any other.

  I won’t die, Rose reminded herself. Whatever happens to me, my body won’t be put in a coffin. But if I talk, life as I know it will die. So this morning, at eleven, I have to face that judge in silence.

  She said to Richard, “I’m sorry. I forgot. Give me your e-mail address. I’ll send it tonight.”

  They were with the juvenile judge less than twenty minutes.

  Rose again failed to discuss anything.

  She did not have to spend a night in any jail. She was not to live at a detention center. They were not going to make her wear an ankle bracelet and be on house arrest. The judge assigned Rose to rehabilitation.

  She was to donate fifty hours to her town, picking up trash.

  “I hope you’re happy,” said her mother through tight lips.

  Rose said nothing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ROSE’S GREAT-GRANDMOTHER STILL walked a mile every day, although it took her an hour to do it. From May through October, Nannie played croquet when it wasn’t raining, whether she had a partner or not. Croquet season had begun, so Wednesday afternoon when Rose came by, Nannie handed her a mallet.

  Nannie rattled on about “the girls” she had beaten in bridge last night. Nannie did not lose well. When she was much younger, Rose used to sit in on bridge games, rooting for Nannie. The older Nannie got, the dottier her friends became, and the easier it was to whip them.