A Faint Cold Fear

  “All right,” Ethan said.

  “I mean it,” Lena told him, knowing that it would be wrong to send Ethan after the guy. She said, “This is a rave. He probably assumed—”

  “All right,” Ethan cut her off. “Stay here. I’ll go get us something to drink.”

  He was gone before Lena could say anything else. She watched his back until he disappeared into the crowd, and she felt like some sort of pathetic schoolgirl. She was thirty-four, not fourteen, and she did not need some punk kid to fight her battles for her.

  “Hey,” somebody said, bumping into her. A perky-looking brunette offered Lena a couple of green capsules, but Lena waved her off, bumping into someone else who was standing behind her.

  “Sorry,” she said, stepping away and bumping into yet another person. The room started closing in on her, and Lena knew she would start screaming if she didn’t get the hell out soon.

  She pushed her way through the throng of people and tried to get to the stairway, but the crowd moved against her like an undertow. The room was still dark, and she felt in front of her, using her hands to push people out of her way, until she could feel another wall underneath her palms. She turned around, guessing from the light on the other side of the room that she’d gone the wrong way. The stairs were on the opposite end.

  “Dammit,” she cursed, feeling along the wall. Her hand found a doorknob, and she pushed the door open, blinking in the bright light. Her eyes adjusted to see a boy lying on his back in bed. He stared at Lena with a sly smile on his face while a blond girl went down on him. He motioned for her to join in, and she slammed the door, turning around and running into Ethan.

  “Whoa,” he said, holding a cup of orange juice to the side so it would not spill.

  The pitch of the music started to wind down, Lena guessed to help the ravers trip. No matter the cause, she almost said a prayer of thanks as her eardrums stopped hurting from the noise.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted,” Ethan said, indicating the cup. “This has vodka in it. I made it myself to be sure.” He pulled a bottle of water out of the pocket of his baggy jeans. “Or you can have this.”

  Lena looked at the cup, wanting a drink so bad her tongue curled in her mouth. “Water,” she said.

  He nodded, as if she had passed a test. “I’ll be right back,” he said, setting the cup on a nearby table.

  “You’re not going to drink it?” she asked.

  “I’m going to get some juice. Wait right here so I can find you.”

  Lena twisted off the top of the bottle of water, watching him go again. She took a long drink, keeping her eyes open so no one could surprise her. Half the kids on the dance floor were so wasted that the other half had to hold them up.

  She found herself glancing over at the table where Ethan had left the vodka. Before she could change her mind, she went over and drank the entire cup in two quick swallows. The drink was nearly neat, with just a splash of orange juice for color. Her chest contracted as the vodka went down, a slow flame filling her esophagus, like swallowing a burning match.

  Lena wiped her mouth with her hand, feeling pins and needles stab into her sore wrist. She tried to remember what time she’d taken the Vicodin. The movie had lasted at least two hours. Walking to the dorm had taken half an hour. How much time were you supposed to allow between dosages?

  “Fuck it,” Lena said, taking the pill out of her pocket and popping it into her mouth. She looked around for something to wash it down with and saw a cup of the pink punch sitting on the table. She stared at the cup, wondering for a split second what was in it before she took a healthy gulp. The concoction tasted like vodka with just enough cherry Kool-Aid to give it its pink color. There was not much left in the cup, and Lena finished it off, banging the cup down on the table when she was done.

  Lena waited three long breaths before the alcohol hit her. A few more seconds passed, and she looked around the room, feeling mellow but far from drunk. This was just a regular party with a bunch of harmless kids. She could do this. The alcohol had taken the edge off, just like she needed. The Vicodin would start working soon, and she would be feeling normal again.

  The music changed to something slow and sensual, the beat lessening in her ears. Someone had apparently turned down the volume again, this time to an almost tolerable level.

  Lena took another sip of water to wash the clingy feeling out of her mouth. She smacked her lips, looking around at the kids in the room. She laughed, thinking she was probably the oldest person here.

  “What’s funny?” Ethan was standing beside her again. He had a bottle of unopened orange juice in his hand.

  Lena shook her head, feeling a sudden dizziness. She needed to move, to walk off some of the effects of the alcohol. “Let’s find the friend.”

  He gave her a funny look, and she flushed, wondering if he noticed the empty cups on the table.

  “This way,” he said, trying to lead her.

  “I can see,” she said, slapping away his hand.

  He asked, “You like this music better?”

  She nodded, nearly losing her balance. If Ethan noticed, he did not say anything. Instead he ushered her to one of the side hallways leading toward the dorm rooms. She could hear different music playing in each room, and some of the doors were open, revealing kids snorting coke or fucking like rabbits, depending on how many people were around.

  She asked, “Is it always like this?”

  “It’s because Dr. Burke’s gone,” he said, “but they do this sort of thing a lot.”

  “I bet,” she said, glancing into another room, then wishing she had not.

  “I’m usually at the library,” he said, though she thought he might be lying. Lena had never seen him there. Of course, the library was pretty big, and Ethan looked like the kind of guy who could easily blend in. Maybe he was there, though. Maybe he had been watching her all along.

  He paused outside a door that was remarkable only for its lack of stickers and lewd notes.

  “Yo, Scooter!” he shouted, rapping his knuckles on the wood.

  Lena looked down at the hardwood floor, closing her eyes, trying to make her thoughts come together.

  “Scoot?” Ethan repeated, banging the door with his fist. He knocked so hard that the door bent back at the top, showing a flash of light between itself and the jamb.

  Ethan said, “Come on, Scooter. Open up, you stupid fucker. I know you’re in there.”

  Lena could not hear much going on behind the door, but she gathered that someone was moving around. Several more minutes passed before the door opened, and a wave of the worst body odor she had smelled in her life hit them like a warm bucket of shit.

  “Jesus,” she said, putting her hand to her nose.

  “That’s Scooter,” Ethan said, as if it explained the smell.

  Lena breathed through her mouth, trying to adjust. “Stinky” would have been a more appropriate nickname.

  She said, “Hey,” trying not to gag.

  Scooter was remarkable in his differentness. Where most of the boys Lena had seen so far had tightly cropped hair and wore baggy jeans and T-shirts, Scooter had long black hair and wore a pastel blue tank top and bright orange Hawaiian shorts. His left bicep had a yellow rubber tourniquet around it, the upper half of his arm bulging from the compression.

  “Aw, man,” Ethan said, picking at the tourniquet. “Come on.” The rubber snapped off Scooter’s arm and flew back into the room.

  “Shit, man,” Scooter groaned. He stood blocking the doorway, but completely without menace. “She’s a goddamn cop. What’s a cop doing here, man? Why’d you bring a cop to my pad?”

  “Move,” Ethan said, gently pushing him back into the room.

  “Am I gonna be arrested?” he asked. “Hold on, man.” He went to the floor, looking for the tourniquet. “Hold on and lemme do this hit first.”

  “Stand up,” Ethan said, pulling Scooter up by the band of his shorts. “Come on, she’s not going to arrest
you.”

  “I can’t go to jail, man.”

  “She’s not taking you to jail,” Ethan said, his voice loud in the small room.

  “Yeah, all right,” Scooter said, letting Ethan help him up. Scooter put his hand to his neck, and Lena noticed that he was wearing a yellow chain much like the one Paul, Ethan’s friend from before, had been wearing. Scooter’s was missing the pacifier and had what looked like a key collection, tiny little skeleton keys of the sort that came with a teenage girl’s diary.

  “Sit down, man,” Ethan said, pushing him onto the bed.

  “Yeah, all right,” Scooter said, as if he did not realize he was already sitting.

  Lena stood just inside the doorway, still breathing through her mouth. An air-conditioning unit was stuck in the window, but Scooter had not turned it on. Addicts usually liked to stay cool so the drug did not sweat out too fast, but from the smell of him, Lena imagined there was enough grease on Scooter’s body to clog every last one of his pores.

  The room was pretty much like all the others: longer than it was wide, with a bed, a desk, and a closet on each side. There were two large windows opposite the door, their panes fogged with grime. Stacks of books and papers lined the floor, take-out cartons and empty beer cans resting on top of them. There was a strip of blue tape down the center of the room, probably to divide the space. She wondered how Scooter’s roommate felt about the smell.

  A small refrigerator served as a bedside table near the bed Scooter now occupied. His roommate had gone with a more traditional small slab of plywood on two stacks of concrete blocks. He had probably stolen the blocks from the construction site over near the cafeteria. Kevin Blake had just sent out a memo two weeks ago asking Chuck to track down the missing blocks because the construction company was going to charge to replace them.

  “It’s okay,” Ethan said, waving her into the room. “He’s totally gorked.”

  “I can see that,” Lena said, but she didn’t move from the open doorway. Scooter was bigger than Ethan in every way: taller, stronger. She hooked her thumb in her back pocket, feeling the knife.

  Ethan sat by Scooter on the bed, saying, “He won’t talk to you if you leave the door open.”

  Lena debated the risks and decided she would be okay. She walked in and shut the door without turning away from them. “He doesn’t look like he can talk— period,” she said. She started to sit on the bed opposite Scooter but stopped herself as she remembered the kinds of things that were going on in the other rooms.

  “I don’t blame you, man,” Scooter said, laughing in short barks, like a seal.

  She looked around the room, thinking there was enough drug paraphernalia in here to stock a pharmacy. Two syringes lay on a small stool by the bed. A spoon with residue sat beside them, and a small bag of what looked like large pieces of salt. They had interrupted Scooter in the process of preparing Ice, the most potent form of methamphetamine. The junk was so pure that he did not even need to filter it.

  “What a fucking idiot,” Lena said. Even her uncle Hank, a speed freak of the highest order, had never screwed around with Ice. It was too dangerous.

  She told Ethan, “I don’t see the point to this.”

  “He was Andy’s best friend,” Ethan said.

  On hearing Andy’s name, Scooter burst into tears. He cried like a girl, open and unashamed. Lena was torn between being disgusted and being fascinated by his reaction. Oddly enough, Ethan seemed to share her feelings.

  “Come on, Scoot, straighten up,” he said, pushing the other boy off him. “Jesus Christ, what are you, a faggot?”

  He glanced at Lena, probably remembering at the last minute that Lena’s sister had been gay. Lena looked at her watch. She had wasted her entire night trying to talk to this stupid kid, and she was not going to give up now. She kicked the bed so hard that both boys jumped.

  “Scooter,” Lena said. “Listen up.”

  He nodded.

  “You were friends with Andy?”

  He nodded again.

  “Was Andy depressed?”

  He nodded again. Lena sighed, knowing she shouldn’t have kicked the bed. He felt threatened now and would not talk.

  She nodded toward the refrigerator. “Do you keep anything in there to drink?”

  “Oh, yeah, man.” Scooter jumped up, as if to say, Where are my manners. He swayed before he got his balance and opened the small refrigerator. Lena saw several bottles of beer and what looked like a plastic liter bottle of off-brand vodka. Between that and the drugs, she wondered how Scooter kept from getting kicked out of college.

  Scooter began, “I got some beer and some—”

  “Here,” Lena said, pushing him out of the way. Maybe if she had one more drink, she’d feel more in control of herself.

  “Glasses?” she asked.

  Scooter reached under the bed and pulled out two plastic cups that had seen better days. Lena uprighted them on top of the fridge and took the orange juice Ethan offered. The bottle was small. There would not be much to drink for all three of them.

  “None for me,” Ethan said, studying her like she was one of his textbooks.

  Lena did not look at him as she mixed the drink, pouring half the orange juice into one of the cups, then spilling in a little vodka. She kept the bottle of juice for herself, filling it to the top with the clear alcohol. She put her thumb over the opening and shook the bottle to mix everything, still feeling Ethan’s eyes on her.

  She sat on the opposite bed before she remembered she did not want to and stared at Scooter as he sipped his drink.

  “This is good, man,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Lena held the juice bottle in her lap, not taking a drink. She wanted to see how long she could last. Maybe she would not drink it after all. Maybe she would just hold it in her hand so that Scooter felt comfortable talking to her. She knew that the first thing you should do in an interview is establish a rapport. With addicts like Scooter, the easiest way to that end was to make him think she had a problem herself.

  “Andy,” Lena finally said, conscious of how dry her mouth felt.

  “Yeah.” Scooter nodded slowly. “He was a good kid.”

  Lena remembered what Richard Carter had said. “I heard he could be a jerk.”

  “Yeah, well, whoever told you that is an asshole,” Scooter shot back.

  He was right, but Lena kept this information to herself. “Tell me about him. Tell me about Andy.”

  Scooter leaned against the wall and flipped his long hair back out of his eyes. He had a startling array of pimples across his cheeks. Lena could have told him that cutting his hair, or at the very least keeping it clean, would have gone a long way toward clearing that up, but she had other things to talk about right now.

  She asked, “Was he seeing anybody?”

  “Who, Andy?” Scooter shook his head. “Not for a long time.” He held out his cup, expecting a top-off. Lena stared at him, not wanting to share.

  She said, “Talk to me first, and then we’ll get you some more.”

  “I need a hit, man,” he said, reaching toward the needles on the fridge.

  “Back off a second,” Ethan told him, pushing him away. “You said you’d talk to her and you’re gonna, remember? You said you’d tell her what she wanted to know.”

  “I did?” Scooter asked, looking confused. He glanced at Lena, and she nodded her confirmation.

  “Yeah, buddy,” Ethan said. “You did. You promised because you want to help Andy.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Scooter agreed, nodding his head. His hair was so filthy it didn’t move.

  Ethan gave Lena a sharp look. “See what this shit does to your brain?”

  Lena ignored him, asking Scooter, “Was Andy seeing anyone?”

  Scooter giggled. “Yeah, but she wasn’t seeing him.”

  “Who?” Lena asked.

  “Ellen, man. Ellen from his art class.”

  “Schaffer?” Ethan clarified, and the name didn’t seem to sit we
ll with him.

  “Yeah, man, she’s so fucking hot. You know what I mean?” Scooter elbowed Ethan suggestively. “So damn fine.”

  Lena tried to get him back on track. “She was seeing him?”

  “She wouldn’t see anybody like him,” Scooter said. “She’s a goddess. Mere mortals like Andy could only deign to sniff her panties.”

  “She’s a walking box of come,” Ethan said with obvious disgust. “She probably didn’t even know he was alive.”

  Scooter giggled again, giving Ethan his elbow. “Maybe he’s up there doing panty raids in heaven!”

  Ethan scowled, pushing Scooter away.

  “What?” Lena demanded, confused.

  “Damn, I heard her face looked like she swallowed a fucking cherry bomb,” Scooter said.

  “Whose face?” Lena asked.

  “Ellen!” Scooter answered, as if it were obvious. “She blew off her head, man. Where the fuck you been?”

  Shock hit Lena like a brick. She had been in her dorm all day, watching the Caller ID. Nan had called a few times, but Lena had not picked up. Ellen Schaffer’s death added a whole new level to the investigation. If it was staged like Andy’s, then Jeffrey would be looking doubly hard at Lena.

  Without thinking, Lena took a small drink from the bottle. She held the liquid in her mouth, savoring the taste before swallowing. The vodka burned as it went down, and she could feel it all the way to her stomach. She exhaled slowly, feeling calmer, sharper.

  She asked, “What about the drug program his parents sent him to?”

  Scooter glanced at the syringes again, licking his lips. “He did what he had to do to get out, you know? Andy liked the pipe. No getting around that. You fall in love once, you keep coming back, like a lover.” Apparently Scooter enjoyed saying the word “lover,” because he repeated it several times, his tongue rolling around his mouth with every repetition.

  Lena tried to put him on the subject again. “So he came back and he was clean?”

  Scooter nodded. “Yeah.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “Up until Sunday, I guess,” Scooter said, and laughed as if he’d made a good joke.