“Then will Arizona be able to rest?”
“Maybe. Anyway, her job here will be done. Raven will know that she loved him and didn’t want to leave.”
I could see how this might work, but in my opinion it wasn’t a whole lot of comfort. The boy would still be wired up wrong. He would still be totally alone.
“Don’t question it, Darina,” Hunter read my mind. “Just do it. Find out how Arizona died. And don’t come back here until you do.”
News emerged earlier today that parents at Ellerton High School, Bishop County, are petitioning for improved security within their school. This comes after the tragic events of the past year, in which four of their senior-high students lost their lives.”
This is what they mean when they talk about shutting the stable door after the horse bolted, I thought as I sat in my room watching Allyson Taylor read the evening bulletin. Our principal, Commandant Dr. Valenti, announced on camera that he had plans to boost the CCTV system around the perimeter and to carry out stop-and-search inspections on students suspected of carrying knives or guns into school. Achtung!
This was despite the fact that none of the four victims died on school premises. Not that this seemed to matter—like I said, most parents were sliding toward mass hysteria, afraid that every day would be their kid’s last.
“Darina, are you going to eat tonight, or not?” Laura called up the stairs.
“Not,” I replied.
“Come on down. I already cooked pasta.”
“So I don’t have a choice?”
“Eat!” she insisted.
Down I went, admiring Arizona’s mom for the professional way she’d presented her own family tragedy on air but glad for once that I had Laura. Allyson Taylor might be well-groomed, slick, and classy; she might be fabulously successful and wealthy, but she was headed for divorce and she’d never been there at mealtimes to nag her kids to eat.
“Why are you smiling?” Laura asked, pushing my plate across the kitchen counter.
“Sorry, I didn’t know it was against the rules.”
In the corner with his plate of pasta on one knee and his laptop on the other, Jim grunted. He meant: Show your mom more respect, or else.
I raised an eyebrow in his direction, meaning, How about you show enough respect to log off and come eat at the table?
Luckily neither of us thought it was worth open confrontation.
“Did you know Arizona Taylor had a brother with autism?” I asked Laura, as casually as I could. I’d spent a long time during classes today planning my course of action and come up with the following bullet points:
Check out autism on the Internet.
Ask Logan to drive with me to the car repair place behind the mall.
Poke around and try to discover more about the Taylor family reputation.
I’d done my autism research before I switched on the TV to watch Allyson read the news. I had a visit to Logan scheduled in straight after pasta. Meanwhile, maybe Laura could dish some Taylor dirt.
She paused with her fork in midair. “No—I believe Arizona was an only child.”
“He would be about nine years old,” I prompted.
“When did the Taylors arrive in Ellerton? That would be eight or nine years back actually. But there was no baby that I remember.” Wow, was Raven a well-kept secret…
Laura chewed her pasta. “You know Arizona was Frank Taylor’s daughter by his first wife? Allyson was not her birth mother.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even know Frank was married before.”
“Yeah—also to a much younger woman. He and Allyson only married after they settled in that big new house out at Westra.” Laura was on a reminiscing roll. “The Madisons were acquainted with them more than most at that time, so they got an invite to the wedding. Jon Madison designed their house.”
At last I thought I spotted a way through the brick wall keeping me from answers about Arizona’s situation. “So are the Madisons still friendly with the Taylors?” If so, I could call in on Summer’s parents.
Laura shook her head. “There’s a story going around that the Taylors didn’t pay Jon all they owed him for his professional work so the friendship soured. And you know, Jon and Heather didn’t really have too much in common with the Taylors—especially with Allyson. She runs with the media pack, and it’s dog eat dog in that world.”
“So definitely no baby brother for Arizona,” I murmured. And the brick wall still stood solid.
“Allyson did take a career break around the time they were building the house,” Laura recalled. “She switched news channels and wasn’t in front of the camera for a while—my friend Kristina swore it was so she could have her face fixed, you know. When she came back on screen, I thought that Kristina was right.”
“Why? How old is Allyson Taylor?” I wanted to know.
“She’s forty-seven,” Laura shot back. “That’s what I mean—she’s definitely had work.”
Logan turned me down flat. “Not now, Darina, I’m busy.”
I’d walked to his place to get him to drive me to the mall, figuring that he would know his way around a car repair garage better than me. Also, he wouldn’t look so out of place. Maybe he could talk to the guy in the workshop, order some parts for a car engine, while I took a look around the place Arizona last recalled visiting.
But Logan said no. This was my second shock of the evening. The first had been when Jim had dropped me a comment just as I was leaving the house, right between telling me the technically correct way to load the dishwasher and heading to the fridge for a beer. “Actually, Allyson and Frank Taylor did have a baby boy,” he’d told me. “Back then I drove a cab, for the extra income. I remember I picked Allyson and the baby up from the hospital and drove them to their new home in Westra.”
Thanks, Jim, for this small, surprise nugget. “So how come Laura didn’t know?”
He’d shrugged and pulled the tab on the can. “I heard the baby wasn’t healthy,” he’d said over the hiss of gas. “Maybe the Taylors didn’t want to talk about it with strangers.”
“Busy—how?” I challenged Logan from the porch. I couldn’t see any schoolwork spread out on the kitchen table, and he didn’t have his head under the hood of his car.
“I have to meet someone,” he said, picking up his car keys and swinging by.
“Someone—who?” Logan Lavelle never turned me down. He was fixated on me, close to becoming my own personal stalker.
“Just a guy,” he said, turning on the engine of his neat white Honda and driving off down the street.
I had to wait until Wednesday afternoon for Logan to be free.
“Sure, I know the workshop,” he told me as we drove into town. “Mike’s Motors. My dad is a drinking buddy of Mike Hamill’s.”
He didn’t ask me why I wanted to visit, which was another change of routine for Logan.
“Don’t you want to know why we’re headed there?” I asked him.
He signaled at the lights, taking a left down the side of the mall. “Would I get a straight answer?”
I took a closer look at Logan’s face. He felt me stare but didn’t react. Sideways on, he looked more serious and mature, almost hot. I mean, he had good features and thick dark hair, a cool catch for some girl somewhere. “I want to check it out,” I explained. “It’s the last place Arizona went before she died.”
All of a sudden we were in a fight.
“What is this—some kind of crazy mission?” he yelled, pulling off the road. He lost it and took a dive into stressedout, I-know-best, and stalker-guy role. “First you obsess over Jonas. Then you tell me you’ll never get over Phoenix. Now it’s Arizona. These guys are dead, for Christ’s sake!”
“I know it looks weird, Logan—”
“This is wrong, Darina. It’s not healthy.”
“So let me out of the car,” I said calmly, opening the door.
I continued on foot to Mike’s Motors. I found it in a back lot—a workshop squeezed between a con
tainer storage yard and an awning fabrication unit. The sign looked like it needed a repaint and the broken glass panel in the door was boarded over.
“Hey!” I called.
There was no answer—just a heap of oily car innards on the concrete floor and a radio playing loud country music. The burned-out wrecks of two cars were stacked one on top of the other in a far corner. In the other I spotted Arizona’s silver SUV.
I had to look twice and then a third time—the vehicle was covered in dust and half hidden behind some other stuff, but I knew Arizona’s license plate and I recognized the neat black leather interior.
“You need something?” a deep voice asked, and I spun round to see Brandon’s friend Kyle Keppler.
Kyle was a mechanic. So not Arizona’s type—the thought hit home a second time, even more clearly than before. He stood with his feet wide apart, big-jawed, dirty, suspicious. Maybe he scrubs up every now and then, I told myself. “Sure. I’m meeting my friend here,” I said to him.
He tilted his head to one side, clearly scoring my tight jeans and T-shirt and coming up with a possible nine out of ten—not quite full marks because I had no cleavage on show. “And his name would be?” he asked.
“Logan Lavelle.” I said the first name that came into my head. Why was Arizona’s dusty SUV still in the workshop? “We met before,” I reminded Kyle. “You were with Brandon Rohr.”
He nodded—one quick jerk of the head. “There’s no Logan Lavelle here.”
“He didn’t bring in his car for repair?”
“Take a look.”
“OK, I made a mistake. Sorry. What’s with Arizona’s car? Didn’t her folks want it back?” I jumped in with both feet, because why not?
Kyle frowned. “I said Logan’s not here.”
“I hear you. I just saw the SUV—it kind of shocked me. Sorry again.”
Maybe I got through to him, or maybe he was still admiring my skinny jeans.
“No problem. Actually, Frank Taylor was happy to sell the car to my boss after Arizona…you know…passed. It needed some work.”
“Which is why she brought it here in the first place, I guess. Hey, it makes sense—you and she were an item. You work here. She’d bring it here for repair, why not?” But then she’d told me she didn’t even know the name of the place, and that was clearly a lie.
Kyle’s mood changed and he walked slowly and menacingly toward me. “Did anyone ever tell you that your mouth could get you into trouble?”
I backed toward the open door. “It was only what Brandon told me. You and Arizona—”
“Brandon’s full of crap,” Kyle muttered. “What he said—it was b.s.”
Tammy Wynette was pouring her heart out on the radio. Stand by your man, or don’t stand by him—I don’t remember which. I was confused and beginning to feel I’d stepped into a grimy parallel universe. “You and Arizona, you weren’t…?”
Kyle took a long, last look at me. “What do you think?” he said, slamming the workshop door behind me.
I didn’t have you down as a quitter, Darina.” My music teacher, Katie Jones, was giving me a hard stare. I stood in the middle of a bunch of students who made up the music group. It included the usual suspects—Jordan, Hannah, Lucas, and Logan. Around twelve of us had gotten together in early fall and planned a Christmas concert in memory of Summer Madison, Ellerton High’s rising singing star. We missed Summer and her beautiful songs, and this would be our special way of respecting her.
“I don’t have time to rehearse,” I explained. Or the focus or the desire.
“Her mind is on other things,” Logan muttered to Hannah. “She’s on her own secret mission.”
“To do what?” Sensing gossip, Hannah pricked up her ears.
“She’s poking around Arizona’s death. Darina’s finger is on the self-destruct button, you watch.”
I blocked them out and tried to focus on my disappointed teacher.
“So who do we get to replace you this late in the semester? It’s really not fair of you to back out now.”
I sighed. “You’ll soon find someone who plays guitar better than me.”
“That sure won’t be difficult,” Jordan murmured to Lucas.
And these were my so-called friends. On the other hand, I was dumping them big-time, so I totally got where their negative vibe was coming from.
Miss Jones walked me toward the door of the music studio. “I had you down as a fighter, not a quitter,” she said quietly. “Are you sure you’re OK?”
“As OK as anyone else around here,” I mumbled, glancing over my shoulder to see Logan deep in gossip with my on-off buddy, Hannah Stoltmann.
Was I right to quit the concert? I went home and brooded.
This was already Friday, and since my visit to Mike’s Motors had misfired, I was way down in the depths of despair. I can’t hack this Arizona stuff. The words ran through my head like a funeral dirge. I don’t know what else I can do.
Friday evening was Laura and Jim’s night at the movies so I had the house to myself. I skipped supper and checked out autism sites one more time. Autism disorder—infantile autism—fragile X syndrome—epilepsy. I read that kids born with autism have feeding difficulties and they never smile. They can rock back and forth in a chair and stare at their hands all day. This can happen to between three and six babies in every hundred, or to 8.7 in every thousand, depending on which site you read. It may be down to rubella during the first trimester of pregnancy or to wrong levels of serotonin in the brain—who really knows? Anyway, it was over my head so I skipped those parts.
What I was interested in were the autistic kids with an outstanding ability—maybe ten percent of sufferers. They may have amazing rote memory or musical ability, and there’s one famous case in the UK where the kid could take one glance at a building—their Houses of Parliament or our White House, say—put pencil to paper, and reproduce the whole thing from memory. In the end, this kid’s artwork got famous. They could be talking about Raven, I thought.
Mostly though, autism can be pure misery. No smiles, no speech. These kids don’t look you in the eye, and because there may be other severe mental health issues they can be on a stack of medication their whole lives.
So what do you do when life deals you a hand like that? I stopped scrolling with the mouse and tried to imagine how the Taylors had coped after Allyson took him home in Jim’s cab. Arizona had talked about diagnoses and treatments, hospitals and schools. She’d also said her parents didn’t want to believe it had happened.
“I heard the baby wasn’t healthy,” Jim had told me. It turned out he was right and the parents had fallen into denial, as in: Let’s keep the illness a secret and then maybe the problem will go away.
Was I right? I would ask Arizona next time we met.
The thought took me away from my laptop to my bedroom window. I stared out at the clear sky. When would that next time be? Not until I’d found the facts behind the myth of Arizona’s suicide—Hunter had made that crystal clear. I closed my eyes and pictured the overlord’s strong, severe features, the faded angel-wing tattoo on his forehead. And I remembered the story Phoenix had told about Hunter being shot through the temple at close range by the man who had just attempted to rape his wife, Marie.
I’m dying here, I told the millions of stars. I needed to go up to Foxton Ridge, to find Phoenix and check that he was still there.
“Give me one reason why I don’t send you back to limbo—and this time for good.” Or words to that effect. I pictured Hunter again—folding his arms astride the patch of burned ground, his anger close to the surface. Even the memory of it scared me—the way the anger could blaze up and wipe out anyone in its path. Hunter was overlord and he had absolute power to hypnotize, read minds—even, as a total last resort, to call those lost souls down to beat their wings and travel with him through time to the beginning or end of the world and beyond.
I trembled at the memory of my own time travel experience to nail down Matt For
tune as Jonas’s killer, how I had never felt such pain before and came back traumatized and exhausted. Which is why Hunter only did it after every other method had failed.
Overlord. Ruler of everything. All-powerful Hunter.
Through the open window I felt a breath of cool breeze. The white drapes fluttered. When I turned around, Phoenix was standing in the room.
“Oh, thank God!” I flung myself into his arms, gripping the sleeves of his jacket, my head against his shoulder. “I didn’t know—I was scared that…”
“Me too.” He held me tight, pressing his lips against the top of my head.
“So scared,” I breathed. “I didn’t dare come back to Foxton. Is Hunter still mad at us?”
“He’s been in a mean mood. He sent me and Lee up to Government Bridge to stand watch.”
“That’s harsh.” Knowing the jealous feelings Phoenix had about Lee, knowing that Hunter would see the dynamics all too clearly. “He certainly figured out how to hurt us.”
“We were up there twenty-four/seven.” Phoenix let go of me and stood back so he could see my face. “I feel so bad, Darina. Lee’s new to this, but he’s able to read my thoughts pretty clearly. He saw what a crazy idiot I’d been.”
I managed a small grin. “Did he beat you up over it?”
“No, he was cool. He told me, if you’d been his girl, he’d have reacted the same way.”
“So I don’t need to worry about two Beautiful Dead guys fighting over me?”
“Lee’s cool,” Phoenix insisted. He slid his arm around my waist and sat me on the bed beside him. “Do you have any idea how low the temperature drops out there late at night?”
“Now I’m crying for you.”
“You should be.”
We stopped talking and made up for all the full-on kisses we’d missed out on lately. I fell into the moment, loving the pressure of his lips on mine, then on my cheeks and softly on my eyelids, deep in that floaty, unreal feeling you get… when Phoenix slowly leaned back. “You know something?”