Fatality Read online

  But she didn’t.

  “You of all people,” said Alan. “I can’t stand the thought of the creeps you’ll be with. What will you actually be doing?”

  “Picking up trash along highways.”

  “Really? What highway?”

  “Wherever the van drops me, I guess.” She had to extricate herself from this before she flung herself against his chest and begged him to go with her. “I’m late, Alan, thanks for, umm, you know, being so nice. See you. Bye.”

  She walked away from him before he could walk away from her, but there was no safety in any direction. Ming had been watching the whole thing from down the corridor.

  “He asked you out and you said no?” hissed Ming when Rose had nowhere to go except up to her.

  “He didn’t actually ask me out. He promised Tabor he’d—” Rose stopped. She didn’t have the energy for this.

  “Oh, well. Let’s go to my house,” said Ming. “My parents don’t get home from work till six-thirty. You and I can really talk because it’ll be absolutely private and you can tell me everything.”

  “There isn’t anything to tell, Ming. Anyway, I can’t go to your house today because I have community service. I’m picking up trash on roadways. It sounds kind of interesting. You wear these orange—”

  “I don’t care what you wear to pick up trash,” snapped Ming. “And don’t pretend you don’t remember taking the police car. What are you going to plead? Memory loss? Insanity? You remember every detail of it, Rose, and you know it.”

  Oddly enough, Rose did not remember every detail. In fact the details, both now and four years ago, had evaporated quickly.

  How grateful she had been for seventh grade after her Lofft visit weekend, because school was as filling as doughnuts. By the end of any school day, Rose felt entirely full, heavy in her stomach, as if she’d eaten an entire dozen.

  Only weeks later, Christmas of her seventh grade, somebody gave Dad a telescope, on the theory that he wanted to watch hawks soaring in the sky. “What did I ever say to make anybody think that?” Dad mumbled. He set the telescope by the bay window, and there it gathered dust. Now and then, Rose would focus on a distant tree or roof.

  For four years, she had seen her mother and father as if through that scope. Close up and painfully clear.

  Then they would slide out of view, and finding them again was difficult.

  Yet as the weeks and months passed, Rose actually forgot.

  Every now and then some phrase or glance would hit her in the face. Rose would want to sink to her knees and cry out, but she would force herself to think of Nannie. No matter how steep the stairs, Nannie labored up and down. No matter how stiff her knees, Nannie gripped that racket. No matter how painful her fingers, Nannie played the piano. So no matter how stiff Rose’s heart, she must keep going.

  “Have you written me off?” said Ming fiercely. “I’m not good enough to tell things to? I’m the last one to find out that you’ve started stealing vehicles, going to judges, getting probation, and having your friends interrogated?”

  “I’m sorry, Ming, but I can’t be late. The judge—”

  “They didn’t come to my house, of course. I guess they only interviewed the important people in your life.”

  If she did not get out of here soon, Rose was going to lie down on the floor and assume fetal position. “I’m sorry, Ming,” said Rose, who was.

  They lived in an age where passing information was the most important thing on the planet. People spent their lives in the exchange of knowledge. If something happened, everybody deserved to know. Some people deserved to know first.

  Rose had broken the rule with her best friend.

  Ming stalked away.

  Alone at last, Rose walked out of the high school. Far across the student parking lot, she saw Chrissie Klein waving and starting to run toward her. If the police had talked to Alan, they had talked to Chrissie. Rose fled, running all the way to the intersection where the transport van waited.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SEVEN PEOPLE WERE being rehabilitated along with Rose: two teenage boys and five men, all of whom claimed to have drinking problems, now solved.

  Everybody assumed that Rose also had a drinking problem.

  The only thing Rose had ever drunk to excess was iced tea, when she was about eight, and she and Chrissie decided to see how much they could drink before they popped. She could remember (thankfully, long before her diary days, so there was no record) being unable to hop up and down, her legs were so tightly crossed, while Chrissie panted, “My bladder’s bigger than your bladder.”

  “I won’t drink again,” said the men in childlike voices, as they were given big shiny orange traffic vests. Each vest was padded like a flotation device, as if they might be diving for trash underwater. The heavy-duty gloves were so large that Rose’s hands fit into the palm part. Each of them was given a long wooden stick like a broom handle, but with a nail tip, to spear disgusting stuff.

  “I’ve quit drinking,” said each man, aghast that he was to be placed on a roadside in public, as if he had done something wrong. Everybody but Rose had a baseball-style cap to yank down over his forehead and hide his face. Everybody told Rose to keep her back to traffic, instead of facing it, or else somebody might recognize her.

  “Don’t you have to be facing the traffic in order to jump out of the way?” asked Rose.

  “You’re not gonna be in the road,” said the supervisor. “You’re gonna keep the traffic barrier between you and the cars. Don’t step over it. There’s no garbage worth dying for.”

  In the van, the men embarked on long, sad stories of alcohol hazes and how they had put the past forever behind them. Rose, who could not put the past behind her, envied them. She clung to her roll of plastic bags and ties.

  “Forget the cigarette butts and the really little stuff,” said the supervisor. “You’re after bottles, cans, plastic bags, Styrofoam, broken suitcases, whatever.”

  Each person was dropped off half a mile apart on the northbound side of Interstate 395. The van would circle, making sure nobody was dropping from heat exhaustion, or running out of drinking water, or trying to leave town.

  She did not make eye contact with the teenage boys. What if she liked one of them? What could be worse than finding your first boyfriend at the side of the road during trash detail? Sharing a romantic moment of Styrofoam-stabbing?

  But one of them nudged her. “Wanna wear my cap?” He was disfigured by acne and crooked teeth, but his smile was kind. He said softly, “Mostly the cars is going by so fast they don’t see you at all. Nobody’s gonna know you. But under the cap you can sort of hide out. You could stick your hair under this.”

  Rose’s blond hair was shoulder length. It was thin and she rarely wore it in a ponytail because she looked bald. Rose needed all the hair she could get and liked it right up next to her face. He was offering her an old minor league baseball cap, black with a red machine-embroidered logo and a misshapen bill from going through the wash.

  “Thank you,” she said. She tucked her hair inside and jammed the bill down on her forehead. The van pulled into the wide right-hand breakdown lane. Rose got out and stepped over the thigh-high metal guardrail and onto the grass, and the van drove away.

  A wide, low hill had been sliced through the middle by the Interstate, two lanes in each direction lying in a shady valley between two long, grassy slopes. The north-and southbound lanes were divided by a football field of grass. Rose was on the northbound side.

  A half mile of highway turned out to have a lot of garbage. There was a tire and tire shreds, two hubcaps, an alarm clock, and several hundred brightly colored advertising inserts that had lost their way. There were dirty napkins, half a paperback book, and a rotting T-shirt.

  Rose filled a bag and rolled the tire over next to it, wondering how the tire had managed to get across the guardrail.

  The sun was pleasantly warm and the road surprisingly interesting.

  S
he glanced up now and then, checking out dragging mufflers or radios loud enough to be heard in the next county. She scrambled up the grassy hill to fetch Styrofoam or used Pampers, but mostly she stood in knee-high green grass, flecked here and there with early white daisies or poison ivy, reaching in for plastic water bottles and paper coffee cups.

  This was the most unlikely after-school activity Rose Lymond ever expected to take up.

  Every now and then, a vehicle strayed slightly out of its lane, its right tires running over the cut marks in the emergency lane designed to wake them up. The noise was shocking, like a sudden freight train, ending the instant the car corrected its wheels. Rose decided it was better not to look at the traffic. Sturdy as the protective metal fence was, Rose could not believe it would really hold back a truck going eighty miles an hour.

  The wind rushed down the cupped valley, yanking the baseball cap from her head and lifting her blond hair. For a moment she felt beautiful, like a model in a shampoo commercial. She laughed out loud. Models hardly ever wore padded orange trash vests.

  The laugh healed her a little. She straightened up, with such a crick in her spine she felt like Nannie.

  So many cars coming so fast. Even now hundreds of them were probably rolling their windows down, preparing to chuck trash into her half mile. Way up ahead she could see a fellow worker on his hillside. The man south of her had not yet come over his hill but a dark SUV, like a square barrel on high tires, had paused in the emergency lane, blinkers on. Once she would have assumed the driver was checking his map. Now she knew he was getting rid of pizza crusts and old shoes.

  Her grassy field came to an end, sloping down sharply to a narrow local road that passed beneath the Interstate. The road was so little used there wasn’t even a line painted down the middle. To reach the rest of her half mile, Rose would have to climb over the guardrail and walk on the overpass for a hundred feet. Oh, well, the emergency lane was designed so that fire engines and ambulances could pass on the right. There was plenty of room for one thin girl, even in a padded vest.

  The lost baseball cap, tossed brutally in the wind tunnels of each passing car, came to rest in the center of the overpass. It huddled up against the cement curb along with lots of other trash.

  The guardrail was nearly as high as her waist. Awkwardly she crossed over, lifting her spear so she didn’t put it through her foot. The cap was blowing around again. She hoped it wouldn’t be whisked out of reach. She heard the rumble of tires on the cut marks, but she was used to the racket now and turned without much interest.

  A car was halfway out of its lane, hurtling forward on the diagonal across the emergency lane.

  It was not braking.

  It was going to hit the bridge.

  It would hit Rose first.

  Chrissie Klein had not had time for breakfast before she left for school, so she was having it after school. Chrissie was a big refined-sugar fan. She was having a Pop-Tart, a sight from which her mother had to be protected, as she did not approve of white sugar. As soon as she finished the Pop-Tart, Chrissie planned to have Froot Loops.

  The Kleins had many phone lines: Chrissie’s, her mother’s office, her father’s office, the fax, and the dedicated Internet. When her own phone rang, Chrissie spoke into it with her mouth full, not worried because any friend of Chrissie’s would have equally low standards of phone etiquette. “Yeah, hello?” she said.

  “Chrissie, it’s Anjelica Lofft.”

  The Pop-Tart all but fell out of Chrissie’s mouth. “Anjelica?” she repeated stupidly. “Lofft?”

  “Yes. How are you, Chrissie?”

  Sugar and crumbs stuck to her tongue and throat. She felt choky and anxious.

  “May we talk?” said Anjelica.

  Chrissie loved to talk. Talking was the reason for life. The problem with school was that during those forty-five-minute stretches of class, only the teacher was supposed to talk. Chrissie had never been able to cope with that. She could think of a million things to ask Anjelica. “Well? Did he murder her? Were you there? Did you see? How’s boarding school? Do you like being a zillionaire? Want to share a million or two?”

  But what came out of her mouth was, “You never invited me for a weekend.” Chrissie was humiliated and astonished to hear herself say that out loud. Four years later she was still so crushed that she actually admitted it? Yikes, thought Chrissie. Time for self-improvement.

  “If we hadn’t moved away, I would have,” said Anjelica. “I was envious of the close friendship you had with Rose.”

  Rose, thought Chrissie. This is about Rose. How strange.

  “The nightmare is back,” said Anjelica. “Once again, the police are convinced that my father murdered his partner. They are equally convinced Rose saw it happen. Rose could not have seen it happen because it didn’t happen. Rose and I saw exactly the same thing because we were waiting in exactly the same car at exactly the same time.”

  “So why aren’t you calling Rose?” asked Chrissie.

  “I thought she might have discussed something with you.”

  “Rose is a very closemouthed person.”

  “I guess so. I heard about the police-car stunt.”

  It wasn’t a stunt, thought Chrissie. It was an unavoidable act of courage. But that was most certainly not the business of snippy snobby Anjelica Lofft, so Chrissie said, “How could you possibly know what Rose Lymond is doing in her spare time in a town you haven’t visited in years?”

  “We’re living at the lake estate again,” said Anjelica. “We’re only ninety miles north.”

  But the car theft hadn’t been on the news or in the papers. Rose’s astonishing act had become common knowledge only when the police questioned the diary names, and Halsey and Jill and Erin had been up half the night on e-mail and phone, making sure everybody knew. But the “everybody” they notified were kids in school. How could Anjelica know? With whom was she still friends?

  “The police were here,” said Anjelica, as if the very soil on her property would have to be cleaned now.

  Chrissie frowned.

  The police were hoping to arrest Mr. Lofft for murder. Why tell him about Rose? Shouldn’t they be a little more protective of somebody they wanted as their star witness? This did not sound protective of Rose. It sounded protective of Milton Lofft.

  “What did Rose tell you about her weekend with me back when it happened?” asked Anjelica.

  Chrissie reverted to seventh-grade behavior. “That you were barely polite, hadn’t arranged a single activity, and didn’t even sleep in the same room.”

  “That’s true,” said Anjelica. “I think we had other things on our minds.”

  “We?” repeated Chrissie Klein. “You and your father? Like, what could have been on your little mind, Anjelica? Murder?” she said cruelly, remembering the pleasure of finding out, as all seventh graders did, how easily you could hurt somebody. Power was when you slashed somebody down.

  Anjelica hung up on her.

  Chrissie expected to feel remorse but didn’t. She poured Froot Loops into a bowl and tried to decide what Rose would want her to do next. It didn’t make sense to Chrissie that Anjelica was pursuing this.

  She was pouring milk on her Froot Loops when it came to her that there must be something else in the diary. Not just Rose Lymond’s secret.

  A second secret.

  A secret that would matter to Anjelica Lofft.

  Chrissie closed her eyes and tried to remember every word she had read in that diary. But if there was a second secret, Chrissie could not come up with it. I should talk to Rose, thought Chrissie. But then I’d have to admit I read the diary. I’d have to admit I know the truth.

  Putting a hand on the overpass railing, Rose simply vaulted over. It was the kind of thing she would never have done if she’d had time to think about it. What if she fell thirty feet to her death on the pavement below? What if she wasn’t strong enough to vault over and got impaled against the railing? What if it would have been
wiser to run forward or dash back?

  But Rose didn’t think, just leaped.

  She was lucky. She was close to the start of the bridge and her fell was only six or eight feet, cushioned by little bushes. Her roll downhill was punctuated by the stabs of sharp little cedars.

  She somersaulted, feet hitting the hot pavement of the little country road. She staggered, got her balance, and ran under the bridge. It was damp in there, and dark. Water seeped through cracked concrete. She wasn’t bleeding, thanks to the padded vest and her jeans, but she was good and bruised.

  Had it been the SUV loitering at the top of the hill south of her? Rose knew her cars, because she was fifteen and thought constantly about what she would own if she could own one. And yet the vast number of cars had made her lose interest; they blurred until they were just traffic.

  She berated herself for not identifying the vehicle. In memory she fought for detail, but she had caught none. She’d been busy saving her skin.

  Above Rose, the car braked rather carefully, probably not even leaving a patch. It came to a stop in the emergency lane. Its bulky frame cast a shadow on the country road below.

  Rose backed up into the depths of the tunnel, her heart pounding like tires on a warning strip. The shadow of the driver leaned over to see what had become of her. The sun was bright and the two shadows had the clarity of black paper cutouts.

  Walk out and wave, she told herself. Let the poor soul know you weren’t hit.

  But she didn’t move. Had the car wandered out of its lane? Or left the lane deliberately? Had the driver felt like scaring any old orange-vested worker by the side of the road? Fair game, the way substitute teachers in school were usually considered fair game? Or, when her cap blew off, had the driver known Rose by her hair?