Defensive Wounds Read online

  Rachael even refused to say where they’d been, which in her daughter’s conversational shorthand meant that they hadn’t been anywhere, instead parked in a dimly lit spot getting much closer than Theresa cared to think about. No wonder Rachael wasn’t in a mood to be sensible. Theresa hadn’t been too sensible earlier in the evening with a man she barely knew.

  Theresa even suggested a trip to the medical examiner’s office to see the crime-scene photographs of the murdered Jenna Simone. Rachael—reasonably—failed to see how that would help, since she didn’t dispute that the teen had been murdered, only that William had done it. Rachael eventually agreed to turn down any future private outings until this question could be resolved to Theresa’s satisfaction, provided that didn’t take longer than a week—yes, her daughter was smart enough to include a completion date. Maybe she should consider law school.

  Rachael also agreed not to mention the murder to William, not because it might send him into a homicidal rage but to protect him from gossip at work.

  But Rachael flatly refused to quit her job, and they both stalked off to bed, to fume and wonder and do anything but sleep. Theresa was comforted by the thought that at least Rachael wasn’t scheduled to work today but William was, so her daughter should be safe at home for the next twelve hours or so.

  What a strange, strange situation. Rachael working side by side with a rapist and murderer, and Theresa couldn’t do a thing about it. She had made an offer (though impossible for her to fulfill) to make up Rachael’s salary for the rest of the summer, but Rachael refused. Jobs were scarce in today’s economy, she liked this one, and she couldn’t quit every time a co-worker had a stain on his record.

  Theresa couldn’t call the cops, who’d taken their best shot at the kid already. She could tell the hotel, but firing him would risk a lawsuit, since he hadn’t been convicted of anything—and Rachael would never trust her again. She couldn’t locate the Rosedales, and Rachael wouldn’t admit knowing their first names or location. The boy didn’t have a parole officer or any legal restrictions on his movements. Which meant that unless she wanted to lock her daughter in her room until college started up again—an idea that had its merits—Theresa was powerless.

  It must be true what they said about desperate times and commensurate measures, because instead of being at work, Theresa now sat in her car at the curb in front of the house where Jenna Simone had lived.

  She’d already taken a look at the crime scene, a handsome two-story Colonial on a corner lot with a neatly manicured lawn and a Little Tikes play set in the backyard, the American dream softened by the early-morning mist. Theresa wondered if real-estate agents had disclosed the history of their living room to the young parents who now lived here. Maybe the price had been too good to pass up, or maybe they didn’t believe in ghosts. Either way she wasn’t going to get out and ask them.

  From there she drove about two miles to Jenna Simone’s address, passing the high school. The homes on this street weren’t as large or as new, but just as tidily maintained and just as uninformative to stare at. The crime hadn’t occurred here, and the bland façade wouldn’t give any clue even if it had.

  Jenna and William had been classmates, but that was all the reports and the newspaper articles would say. Were they friends? Had they dated? Jenna had apparently given William a ride home of her own free will. There’d been no signs of struggle inside the vehicle, parked courteously in the turnaround of William’s driveway. The neighbors had not seen or heard anything amiss. Had Jenna entered William’s home voluntarily? Why? Because she wanted to be there? Or simply because she thought she had nothing to fear?

  While Theresa stared at Jenna’s former home as if it might be able to tell her, the door opened and an older woman exited. Thin, wearing clean sweatpants and a jersey cardigan buttoned all the way to her neck, she shuffled down the driveway in bedroom slippers, heading for the paper box on a post at the curb. Something about her seemed familiar.

  She caught sight of Theresa, and her pace slowed. She ducked her head to get a better look at the car’s occupant and apparently decided that the forensic scientist appeared harmless enough. She continued to the curb, ignored the newspaper, and came up to the open passenger-side window.

  Theresa decided that driving away would seem even creepier, so she smiled. “Hi. Sorry to be parked at your curb.”

  She had no idea what to say after that but needn’t have worried.

  “Are you a reporter?” the woman asked.

  “What? No.”

  “Because you’ve missed the anniversary by a few weeks.”

  “Anni—”

  “Of my daughter’s murder.”

  CHAPTER 29

  *

  “I’m not a reporter,” Theresa said, “but would you mind talking to me for a few minutes about your daughter’s death? I have no right to ask, and I don’t want to upset you—”

  “The only thing that upsets me is people not asking about Jenna’s murder. I want them to ask me, ask the cops, ask the courts, all day and all night. Why don’t you come inside? I have coffee brewing.”

  “I would really appreciate that,” Theresa said, with no idea how to explain why she would appreciate hearing about a mother’s worst nightmare from another mother, why she wanted to take a sunny morning on which this woman had been about to enjoy a peaceful breakfast with her paper and instead make her relive what no human being should have to withstand.

  Maybe because she was desperate. Maybe because she didn’t know what else to do. She locked her car and followed the woman through the strengthening daylight, right up to the neat little door in the neat little house.

  The neat little door had barely closed behind them when the woman asked, “So who are you? My name’s Coral, by the way. The kitchen’s straight ahead. Have a seat.”

  Theresa couldn’t give her credentials, imagining news articles about the M.E. office staff harassing the families of murder victims. She bought time by commenting on the coziness of the room. Yellow patterned wallpaper and white curtains and fixtures, ceramic tile, a baseball trophy on the windowsill over the sink. Next to it sat a prescription pill bottle. Theresa decided to rinse her hands at the faucet later, get a peek at the label.

  Mrs. Simone reasonably persisted. “But who are you, if you’re not a reporter?”

  “I believe that my daughter has made the acquaintance of the boy accused of killing your daughter. I’m here because I just don’t know what to do. I can’t call the cops, and I can’t lock my daughter in her room. I need to convince her that this boy is dangerous, but I don’t know how.”

  That brought Mrs. Simone up short, and Theresa felt inexplicably guilty at the outpouring of sympathy that followed. “You poor dear! How terrible! How did she meet him? Where is he?” She clapped a mug of steaming liquid onto the table in front of Theresa, spilling some of it, and wiry fingers clasped Theresa’s arm. “Where is he?” she demanded again, in a puff of Folgers-scented breath.

  “I don’t know where he lives. She met him at work.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “I … probably shouldn’t say.”

  Her host did not take that well, and her eyes narrowed. Then she slumped into the chair across from Theresa and said, “I’ve been looking all over for him.”

  Theresa didn’t want to ask any of these questions, but she was here and Mrs. Simone wanted to talk. “Why?”

  “Why? He murdered my child. He raped and murdered my Jenna, and he’s walking around free and the authorities are protecting his privacy like he’s some kind of victim! Of course I try to … monitor him. Someone’s got to. For the sake of girls like your daughter.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “The day they let him go. The day that group of brain-dead morons trooped back into that box they were kept in and said ‘Not guilty.’ ” Despite this woman’s vehement words, Theresa decided that she was not crazy, drug-addled, or even unbalanced. She was merely a sens
ible but grieving mother. It made Theresa feel guiltier still, as if she were there under false pretenses even though she wasn’t—the danger to Rachael felt very real indeed.

  “Did Jenna know this William from school?”

  “Yes. Her friends said so at the trial, but I don’t remember her mentioning him to me. She could have. She probably talked about a hundred different kids just during those two years of high school.”

  “I know what you mean—teenage girls. What did her friends say about him?”

  “That he was in Jenna’s chemistry class, but they didn’t know of any relationship beyond that. ‘They knew each other to say hi’ was how they put it. They were friendly, but he had never asked her out or vice versa.”

  Theresa sipped at the hot, bitter liquid. She helped herself to sugar from a shaker on the table; she wanted cream, but it seemed callous to ask her hostess for both her most painful memories and access to her dairy products. “Were these friends at the dance, too?”

  The woman nodded, her hands wrapped around the warm coffee mug. If other people lived in the house, they either had not stirred yet or had already left for the day. Not so much as a creak sounded upstairs. “Yes, but they were off chasing boys, of course. One saw Jenna leave with him but didn’t speak to her.”

  “Were they surprised that Jenna left the party with him?”

  “Not really. Everyone figured it the same way: William was drunk, and Jenna gave him a ride home.”

  “Leaving his car at the school. Where did this alcohol come from, at a school party?”

  “Alcohol shows up at every school party, according to the kids. Not even a murder trial could make them ’fess up to who brought it. He probably brought it himself, since no one else got that drunk and his parents have a well-stocked liquor cabinet. There was testimony about that at the trial, too.”

  But had he been drunk? Or drugged, as Marie had said? “So Jenna probably intended to drop him off, then come back and get her friends. Was that like her, to leave a dance to give a ride to someone she didn’t know that well?”

  Coral Simone pressed a tissue to her nose, to stifle not a tear but a small sneeze, and nodded. “Jenna was very softhearted—to everyone but her mother, like most teenage girls.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “She never wanted to see anyone get in trouble. Once, when she was about ten, one of her brothers—Teddy, my middle one—left his bike behind my husband’s car, who crumpled it leaving for work that morning. We had to harp on Teddy constantly about responsibility—he was just that kind of a kid. He’s twenty-two now and still loses his cell phone every other week. So Jenna said she had borrowed it and left it in the driveway. Didn’t fool her father or me for a second, since she could hardly reach the pedals, but she tried.”

  Theresa hoped she would never have to tell Rachael’s childhood stories this way—as if the pain ran so deep that the words were squeezed up from below. “Where are your boys now?” She had no reason to ask, other than to get the woman’s mind away from Jenna for a second.

  “My oldest is working with his father in Chicago, and the other has one more year at Caltech.”

  It occurred to Theresa that Coral Simone might only have a few years on her but looked a good two decades older. Her flesh seemed to stretch over the bone with nothing in between, as if grief had eaten up everything that was soft in her body. Was this what losing a child did to you? “So your husband—”

  “Already had one foot out the door but stuck around for another year after Jenna was murdered. More for the boys than for me, but I’m grateful to him for that. Once they headed for college, though, that was all she wrote. He packed his bags and never came back, and honestly, I’m grateful to him for that, too. If I had to hear one more word about acceptance, about moving on, I think I’d have—My daughter died seventy years too soon, died bewildered and screaming. How am I supposed to accept that?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Theresa said, acutely aware of the inadequacy of those words.

  “So where does your daughter work?” Coral Simone repeated. Then she sneezed again and saved Theresa from answering. “I’m sorry. Do you have a cat?”

  “Um … yes.”

  Coral Simone wiped her nose. “I’m allergic. Did you follow the trial at all?”

  “What happened at the trial? Why was he found not guilty?”

  “How did he get off, you mean?” Coral stood and refilled their cups, as if this might be a long tale. “Two things. The murder weapon and that bitch lawyer of his.”

  “Marie Corrigan.”

  “Yes. The one who was just killed at that hotel downtown. Don’t ask me to shed any tears for her.” The woman smiled in a way that made the hair on Theresa’s arms stand up, though in Coral’s shoes she would have felt exactly the same way—and that really gave her the creeps.

  “She got murdered, too,” the woman went on. “The coincidence of that just blew me away, but then I thought, she surrounds herself with murderers, so it’s really not so surprising, is it? Anyway, first she got him tried as a juvenile and not an adult. Then she went on and on about the murder weapon, how he’d passed out so he couldn’t have gotten rid of it, and if he could have, then he also could have cleaned up the scene or called his parents for help—the same parents who spent every penny they had either bribing or suing the papers, the TV, the national channels, even the school to keep their son’s name out of the public eye.”

  Theresa interrupted this rant to ask, “What do you think happened to the weapon?”

  Coral Simone sneezed again and wiped her eyes. “The cops did look for it. Have you seen the house? It’s on a corner lot, and there’s a little bit of woods behind it, running up the street. They searched the entire area with a metal detector and even dogs. She harped on that, too, that if the police looked so thoroughly and couldn’t find it, it was well and truly gone, and he couldn’t have done it because he was passed out. And if he wasn’t passed out and hid the murder weapon, why not hide Jenna’s body? Maybe he had an accomplice,” Coral went on. “The cops questioned all his friends, and I questioned all Jenna’s friends about his friends until their parents told me to stop calling. Women I’d known for years, and they hung up on me. They still have their daughters … Anyway, they never found any accomplice. I thought he could have buried it along a pipe or by an electrical cable, someplace where a metal detector would already go off and be disregarded. He could have wedged it inside his car frame somehow. I don’t really know. Or, I thought, maybe he never used a fireplace poker at all. Maybe he used something that looked like it, then cleaned it and hid it in plain sight around the house. There’s an endless list of places to hide something in a house, believe me. My oldest smoked for a while, and I’m still finding packs of cigarettes he forgot about. Would you like to see her room?”

  “Um … yes.”

  Coral stood up, and Theresa used the opportunity to take her cup to the sink, acting the polite and helpful guest while she checked out the windowsill. Next to Coral’s trophy sat a good-size bottle of alprazolam with her name on it. Not too surprising. If someone had murdered my daughter, Theresa thought, I’d need some Xanax to sleep, too.

  Theresa followed Coral upstairs into a TV version of a teenage girl’s room. White-and-pastel quilt on the bed, pale blue walls, white furniture with photos tucked into the corners of the mirror and necklaces strung on the bedposts. A small shelf held more sports trophies and medals. Schoolbooks still sat on the end table, and a video-game controller snaked out from a little television on the bookshelf. An aluminum bat stood in the corner, handle end up, a pair of batting gloves propped over them. The wooden furniture gleamed as if it had just been polished that morning.

  Coral folded herself into a white wicker armchair as Theresa slowly circled the room, coming to a stop in front of the vanity table. She studied the photos. Jenna had been slender, with straight blond hair past her shoulders. Every teenage boy’s dream.

  “You keep this room so cle
an,” Theresa said, meaning, You’ve turned it not only into a shrine, but an obsessively well-kept shrine.

  “Dust bothers me,” Coral Simone said simply. “And my evenings are free.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Parry Engineering. I’m a data programmer, mostly low coercivity. It’s decent pay, flexible hours. Which is why I have this morning off.”

  In most of the photos Jenna appeared with other girls, but here and there a boy cropped up. There were none of William. “Was Jenna dating anyone when she died?”

  “Not steadily. She had broken up with a boy about a month before that, but they hadn’t dated very long. That seems to be different about this generation. When I was young, I felt like a complete loser if I didn’t have a steady boyfriend. Girls now don’t seem to care so much about that. I guess it’s an improvement.”

  Theresa picked up a heart-shaped piece of wood about the size and thickness of her palm. It had Jenna’s name burned into it, along with a few other decorative curlicues, and held down a shopping list Jenna had scribbled on a Hello Kitty notepad: “tampons, underwear, mascara (coupon!),” and something that looked like “paint.”

  “Her chem-lab partner made her that,” Coral said. “I should clarify about dating—she always had boys asking her out. But she didn’t go unless she really felt interested. She wouldn’t let a boy spend time or money on her just for her to have something to do. My boys … well, they have their father’s attitude toward fairness, but to Jenna, justice meant something.”

  Theresa looked at her, sensing a not-too-subtle point in the making.

  “And then it failed her so badly,” Coral finished.

  Theresa glanced over the bookcase—romance novels, crime dramas, two shelves of movies from Disney to horror, and more framed photographs, most with younger versions of Jenna and her brothers, her parents, her team. “Was it just the missing murder weapon that caused the jury to acquit?”