Fatality

  In croquet, Rose was yellow. Red was never a choice because Nannie was always red. “I just bought a new computer game. SlaughterHound III,” Nannie told Rose. “It’s so exciting.”

  “It’s violent, is what it is,” said Rose, whacking her great-grandmother’s ball out of bounds. “You are sick, Nannie.”

  “Nonsense. Living in New England makes a person stodgy and I have to guard against it. I don’t know why I’ve stayed here eighty-six years. I’m really a California girl. I’m beginning to think I should have handled my life differently.”

  Rose laughed. “Nannie, you know perfectly well you think you handled your life better than anybody.”

  Nannie’s sharp old eyes pinned Rose. “Better than you.

  So Dad had told Nannie. Rose resented it. If nobody at school had to know, why did anybody at home?

  “Do you have any violence you’d like to share with me?” said Nannie.

  “No.”

  “You have to talk to somebody, darling.”

  “I don’t, actually. Americans have the right to remain silent.”

  “I’m your great-grandmother. You don’t have silence rights with me.”

  Rose gave her own yellow ball a tremendous whack, knocking herself into the weeds by the hemlocks. It would take some time, making little baby-size hits, to return to the game. She followed her ball.

  Rose had read about contemplative nuns who lived in a cloister and kept silence. They uttered nothing but prayers. Even at dinner, there was no speech.

  You really would need convent walls to live that way, because talking was the most important thing in the decade Rose occupied. If you did not talk out loud, you talked by typing into your computer, or you listened to the talk of others, on the radio, the television, or in the chat rooms.

  She understood why nuns had worn cowls and wimples. If you were to keep silence, you needed all the protection you could get.

  Nannie dropped her mallet on the grass and walked slowly over to one of the cast iron chairs under the weeping willow. She sat down heavily in a chair so encrusted with rust and bird droppings that nobody would get near it.

  Wonderful, thought Rose, I’ve given her a stroke. “Are you all right?” she called.

  “No.”

  Unwillingly, Rose walked back. “Nannie, you know I would suspect you of anything. Are you having a heart attack or is this a ploy to make me talk?”

  “It’s a ploy, darling. You’re so clever. I love that in a person.” Nannie patted one of the disgusting chairs. “Sit with me.”

  Rose sat on the mossy ground instead.

  “Rose, darling, your father is my favorite grandson, even though I have four of them. Even though it’s wrong to have favorites. And you are my favorite great-grandchild, even though I have eleven. You have my name. I’m Margaret Rose and you’re Rose Margaret. I will live on in you.”

  Nannie’s skin was so wrinkled she looked as if life had done to her what Rose had done to the white doughnut bag, spindling and crushing. Standing with a mallet in her hand and the grass beneath her feet, her great-grandmother looked able to go on forever. But collapsed on the ruined chair under the weeping tree, Nannie looked finished. She could die tomorrow.

  Rose’s throat closed. “Nannie,” she said desperately, “you raised a lot of rim in your day. You’ve told me a hundred stories about how rowdy you were.”

  Nannie twined a lock of Rose’s hair in her stiff, swollen fingers. Her voice was soft as moss. “Rowdy is fine. Raising rim is fine. But this is criminal, Rose. Your father tells me you were in juvenile court. Oh, honey, it must have been so awful.”

  Rose could not look into Nannie’s face. She dreaded Sunday dinner, when she’d have to look at Mopsy and Popsy. Her grandparents loved to brag about her. Sunday she was expected to run through a list of the week’s triumphs in school. She thought of being condemned and cornered by three generations of family.

  “You tell me what happened,” said Nannie gently. “If I agree that you should stay silent, I’ll order your father to stand behind you. I will tell him he’s to ask no questions. The family will back you up.”

  Rose plucked a little mattress of green moss. She used to bring her tiny Fisher Price families out here, building them sod houses with thatch roofs. She changed the subject. “The judge wasn’t so bad. My community service is picking up trash along highways. I have to do it for fifty hours.”

  “That seems excessive.”

  “I don’t mind, Nannie. I thought I’d have to stay in some juvenile detention facility or enter a foster home.”

  “I’m talking to your father about boarding school,” said Nannie.

  “Boarding school!” Rose was horrified. “Why would I want to leave home? What about my friends?”

  “You’ll make new ones. I loved boarding school. I went to Northfield Academy in the Berkshires. Western Massachusetts is beautiful.”

  “I won t go.”

  “Rose, Rose,” said her great-grandmother. ‘You are still a child and must do as you are told. Anyway, I don’t know how much fun school is going to be from now on. The police are off interrogating your friends as we speak.”

  Chrissie Klein was astonished to find police standing in her doorway. She was even more astonished to find they wanted to talk about Rose Lymond.

  Chrissie could not imagine Rose doing anything wrong. She was a person to be admired, possessing all the virtues, being brave, kind, clean of heart, and honest. This could be annoying. Rose was also careful and deliberate. She didn’t think twice before she did something but considered it for six or eight months. This could be very annoying.

  Both officers were hung with weapons and badges, trousers crisply ironed and bodies solid. The woman’s name tag said Megan Moran. She was over six feet tall. How she must have intimidated Rose, who was only five five. For the millionth time, Chrissie dreamed of being taller, because in basketball, Chrissie’s five ten was pitiful. “Bet you played basketball,” she said to Megan Moran.

  “Yup. St. Mary’s High. Then Boston. But I didn’t last. I wasn’t good enough.”

  Chrissie planned to die before thinking, let alone saying out loud, “I wasn’t good enough.”

  “Are your parents home, Chrissie? We’d like them to be present.”

  “Come on in. My mother’s here.” Chrissie’s heart sank. Mom was an adolescent psychologist. She believed every teenage girl should want to be admired for her mind and spirit. Chrissie wanted to be admired for her body. This caused arguments.

  The moment her mother was here, everything would become complex, with extra meaning and tiresome layers. On the other hand, Mom would not let the police get away with one molecule of pressure, and that was good.

  “Mom,” she called.

  Just as it was important for Chrissie to look wonderful, it was important to her mother to attach no meaning to looks. Mom wore a sagging, faded black dress, white athletic socks with dark shoes, and no makeup. Her glasses had had the same frames for half Chrissie’s life. She had not yet fixed her speckled black-and-gray hair. She looked vaguely like a porcupine, bristling with quills, ready to pierce passing police officers.

  “You will recall the murder of Frannie Bailey almost four years ago,” said Megan Moran. “Frannie Bailey was the partner of Milton Lofft. The murder probably took place on Friday of the weekend Rose Lymond visited the Lofft estate.”

  How envious Chrissie had been. All that glamour and wealth—and it was Rose who snagged the weekend. Chrissie had angled for a friendship with Anjelica but never achieved it.

  “On that Friday afternoon,” said Megan Moran, “Milton and Anjelica Lofft picked Rose up. Mr. Lofft stopped en route at his partner’s house. We believed then and we believe now that Milton Lofft murdered his partner while his daughter and Rose sat waiting in the car. No charges were brought because the physical evidence was weak. But the case has been reopened.”

  Wow, thought Chrissie, I wonder why. DNA evidence, which they might not ha
ve had before? Some secret witness?

  She began to feel the same sick fascination with the crime that had gripped her four years ago. She’d had high hopes that Rose had seen it happen and would be a vital witness at the trial, which would be televised, so Chrissie could stay up late to watch attorney experts on TV analyze Rose’s words.

  “Day before yesterday, we questioned Rose again,” said Megan Moran. “Again Rose claimed to remember nothing. On the off chance that Rose had written down some long-forgotten clue, Mrs. Lymond gave us a diary Rose kept that year. It was put in the police car to be read later. To prevent us from reading the diary, Rose stole the police car, drove to Burger King, went into the rest room, ripped up the murder weekend pages, and flushed the shreds away. Then she waved us down to arrest her.”

  “Awesome!” Chrissie couldn’t help laughing and cheering. She imagined Rose, in her cautious way, signaling early and often—in a stolen police car. Rose would be a goddess at school. “You do not know how out of character that is. I cannot wait to tease her.”

  Mrs. Klein was not pleased with her daughter’s reaction. She said stiffly to the police, “You cannot conclude from her reluctance to have her diary examined that Rose witnessed anything. Little girls write things they later regret. Perhaps she was repeating vicious gossip or discussing her sexual yearnings.”

  Chrissie cringed. She detested having a mother who talked like that. Rose would detest it even more.

  Megan Moran shook her head. “We think she’s protecting Milton Lofft.”

  What happened to you when you stole a police car? Would Rose go to jail? That would not be awesome at all. Chrissie would be a character witness; explain that stealing a police car was an aberration. Perhaps Rose had been on something. Except Rose was not the type to be on anything other than an academic high.

  “Mrs. Lymond keeps a detailed family date book,” said Megan Moran, “and she doesn’t throw them out but saves them the way other people save photo albums. She dug out that year’s calendar for us. We discovered that Rose had a slumber party the following weekend. Erin, Halsey, Jill, Melinda, and you, Chrissie, were invited.”

  Shock ripped through Chrissie Klein.

  She should have known instantly what this was about. How could she have forgotten one word? But four years was a quarter of her life. Time enough to fill her mind with other things.

  “What do you remember about that slumber party, Chrissie?” asked the policewoman.

  Chrissie shrugged helplessly, although she despised helpless people, especially girls.

  “Surely a bunch of girls jammed in the same bedroom and giggling into the night begged for details about a murder. Surely you, her friends, pressed Rose very hard.”

  “We begged,” agreed Chrissie. “We offered bribes of friendship and chocolate. But Rose said it had been boring and there was nothing to tell and we couldn’t believe it.”

  Chrissie especially had not believed it. Not for one minute.

  Mrs. Lymond had probably not entered it in her date book, because it was a constant, but Tabor’s band had been practicing in the basement. The seventh-grade girls adored the older boys. Rose’s special crush was on Alan Finney. Chrissie herself worshiped whichever boy bothered to say hello. Jill and Melinda were in love with Tabor. Halsey and Erin loved to watch Verne Burnett, the oldest in the band and the one most likely to practice with his shirt off.

  And so when Rose suggested going down to the basement to see if the boys would play Ping-Pong or pool with them (which they wouldn’t, because fifteen-and sixteen-year-old boys were nauseated by the presence of twelve-year-old girls), everybody stormed down two sets of stairs, their hopes high and their hair fixed.

  Except Chrissie, who stayed behind to read Rose’s diary.

  Rose’s bed had a big slanted wooden headboard with a lock. When you threw all the pillows on the floor, you could spot the half-hidden keyhole, and if you went into Rose’s closet and lifted her bathrobe from its hook, you found the key. Inside the headboard were cubbies, poorly designed and hard to get at Rose kept her diary at the bottom of the left-hand cubby.

  Chrissie remembered the texture of the leather cover. The gleam of the gold-rimmed pages. She remembered flipping quickly to the end, reading with hot, eager eyes. The entries stunned and horrified her. She read them a second time, slowly, as if expecting a nicer, better version on the second try. Then she chucked the diary back into the cubby and slammed the wooden lid, fumbling badly with the key.

  She thundered downstairs to catch up with the others, pretending she’d been in the bathroom. She arrived just as the boys yelled at them to beat it. Halsey and Erin were complaining because Verne wasn’t around that night and she remembered thinking what a tiny complaint that was, compared to what Rose had on her mind. She wondered how Rose could bear to have them in the house. She wondered how Rose could bear anything.

  And yet, Chrissie had forgotten.

  “Why wouldn’t Anjelica have been invited?” asked the policewoman.

  Chrissie surfaced with difficulty. “The party probably wasn’t good enough for Anjelica,” she said. “She went through friends like a recycler through aluminum cans.”

  Immediately she was ashamed. You shouldn’t hold against somebody how she’d behaved in seventh grade. “Listen,” she corrected herself, “we barely knew Anjelica. We were just in class together. She was new when school started the last week in August and she moved away before Thanksgiving. I haven’t thought of her for years and I don’t think Rose has, either.”

  Oh, Rose! she thought. You might forgive me for invading your privacy and going into your cubby and reading your diary. You probably wouldn’t even be surprised, because what seventh graders are is untrustworthy, snoopy, and mean. But you would never forgive me for knowing the truth. I can’t even pick up the phone to tell you I’m on your team. You were alone then and you have to do this alone now.

  “We need your help, Chrissie,” said Megan Moran. “If Rose is protecting a killer, that killer will be scared right now. He needs her silence. He might decide he can’t trust her silence. He might decide to silence her forever.”

  But Chrissie Klein, too, said nothing.

  Alan Finney was home when the police arrived, which was rare for Alan, since he played sports year-round and when he wasn’t at practice, worked at a garden center. He liked lifting bales of hay, sacks of birdseed, pallets of cobblestones, and trees whose root balls weighed as much as the customer. He’d inherited the job from Verne, a guy in Tabor’s band, whose brains the owner had compared to a tree stump. For months at the nursery, Alan got compliments for no reason except he wasn’t Verne.

  Alan had dumped his sports equipment and books and snacks and computer stuff on the floor of the front hall, which was his basic exchange system. His parents used the side door so as to avoid breaking an ankle.

  The police made no comment as they forded the stream of Alan’s possessions and made it into the living room. The living room was even worse, because his sister was getting married, and wedding plans and possibilities were strewn on every surface. They talked standing up.

  The policewoman was his own height, six one. He studied her name tag. “Did you play for St. Mary’s?”

  She was extremely pleased to be recognized.

  “My sister went to St. Mary’s,” Alan explained.

  “Hey? Would that be Cecily Finney?” said the policewoman, beaming. “Say hi to her for me. Is this her wedding you’re planning?”

  “I’m not planning it,” said Alan with a shudder.

  When they started talking about Rose Lymond, Alan was simply astonished. If there was a person more law-abiding, more cautious, more academic, Alan hadn’t met her. She was such a contrast to Tabor, who was not all that law-abiding, never cautious, and despised academics. It was actually kind of a miracle that any college had taken Tabor. Of course, he had had to go two thousand miles to find one.

  “Stole a police car?” said Alan. “Rose? Impossible. A
definite case of mistaken identity.”

  The police explained why there was no mistake about it.

  Alan couldn’t imagine Rose stealing a paper clip. “But why?” he said. He didn’t tell the two police that he thought Rose had done something outrageously wonderful. Or insane.

  Craig Gretzak told him about the diary and its place in the murder investigation.

  A few months ago, when Alan turned eighteen, the baseball coach had coaxed most of the team to donate blood. Alan had not done well at the sight of needles. His head and heart and knees blended, and he found himself on the floor, with a doctor saying, “Alan, you better not try this again. You are literally green.”

  I’m probably green now, he thought.

  He managed to stay upright, though, which he had not accomplished at the Red Cross. He busied himself shifting wedding stuff onto the floor so they could sit on the couch. Cecily’s magazines seemed harder to lift than a pallet of patio slate.

  “We retrieved the remains of the diary,” said Craig Gretzak, “and we’re talking to any kid Rose mentions. Mrs. Lymond helped us interpret some of the entries. It looks as if you know the Lymonds well.”

  “Just Tabor.” Tabor had the largest family Alan had ever come across: uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents. He was always visiting or being visited by some relative or other. By high school, Tabor was embarrassed by so much family and spent much time in seclusion, hoping to avoid them. “Why can’t I be an orphan?” Tabor moaned. “Why can’t I be normal and have all my relatives living in other states, with mountain ranges between us?”

  A rock band had created something of a mountain range. No relatives visited when the band was practicing. Now that Alan was eighteen he could admit none of them had had talent. But they had sure had fun.

  Nobody in the band paid any attention to Tabor’s kid sister. It was pesky the way she’d sit on the top step of the basement stairs writing away in her diary when the band rehearsed below. “Beat it, Rose,” Tabor would yell.

  “No. These are my stairs, too.”

  “Well, cut it out with the journal. Stop writing about us.”