Beautiful Dead 3: Summer

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’ Byron Lavelle had asked.

  Dr Hoffmann had tilted his head to one side then shrugged.

  ‘Logan drove through the storm after me,’ I said to Laura. ‘He was scared I was driving into trouble.’

  ‘That’s Logan,’ she sighed. ‘Always looking out for you.’

  ‘He told me he never wanted anyone except me. Word for word, that’s what he said.’

  Laura stared straight ahead, her face drained of colour. She didn’t ask me the obvious question, which was why was I out at Foxton in the first place? She didn’t say, ‘Poor Logan.’ She didn’t say anything.

  The thing was, Phoenix had lied to me. He’d told me they hadn’t found any far-siders up on the ridge while all the time Logan had been there, searching for me. That was why he and Dean had set up the winged barrier. But Phoenix hadn’t given me those facts.

  I sat in the hospital corridor, unable to erase the picture from my mind – Logan getting out of his car, leaving the shelter of the aspens and staggering onto the ridge. Logan battered by the wind and rain, and then the Beautiful Dead wings, followed by skulls crowding in on him, terror ripping into his brain. He would put up his hands and crouch down to protect himself, he would lose his balance and fall over a sheer drop. It would feel like someone had pushed him.

  The fall – a mighty blast from behind, a moment of shock then everything in slow motion … the tipping forward into black emptiness, the drop into thin air.

  ‘Come home,’ Laura pleaded with me. It was Tuesday midday. Logan’s surgery was due to start at one-thirty p.m.

  ‘I want to stay here.’

  ‘Listen to your mom,’ Dr Hoffmann advised. He was a young guy just out of med school – nervous, a little out of his depth. ‘Go home and rest up. Logan will be in theatre all afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll be here anyway,’ Byron muttered.

  They took him off to the family room again where he could wait in peace.

  ‘Come home, Darina.’ Mom was begging me. ‘You can be back here when Logan comes round from the anaesthetic.’

  I looked up at Hoffmann. ‘Can I see him before I leave?’

  He nodded and showed me into Logan’s room, which was full of monitors flashing numbers and graphs that showed heartbeat, pulse rate, blood pressure, whatever.

  Logan lay on the bed, eyes closed, with an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. More tubes fed into his arm, plus they’d positioned stickers and wires over his heart.

  ‘Logan?’ I crept to the bedside and leaned over him.

  ‘Go ahead.’ The doctor encouraged me to speak. ‘There’s a chance he can hear you even though he’s in a coma. But don’t expect any response.’ He left me alone with the patient.

  ‘Hey,’ I breathed. ‘How are you doing? … They’re taking good care of you … You’re going to come through this …’

  The machines beeped and flickered their vital messages across the screens. Logan lay totally still, his face drained of colour, his thick brown hair combed back from his forehead. I touched his cheek. ‘Stay with us, Logan,’ I whispered. ‘I need you, you hear?’

  He died anyway – my Logan. My poor Logan died in the cold, dark night trying to help me. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that he was dead and I was alive – Logan, who should have had a whole happy, wonderful life ahead of him.

  I pictured him sitting on his porch telling me a funny story, asking me about my day. There was the Logan grin, the kind eyes that never lied – gone for ever.

  My Logan died.

  I got up from the kitchen table and left the house, I walked down the street to Logan’s place and sat on the porch step. Any moment now he would turn the corner in his white Honda.

  I watched the guy from two doors down drive his Toyota truck on to the sidewalk. I saw kids walk home from school. Late in the afternoon Byron drew up at the kerbside. He saw me on the porch step but walked right past me into the house. After five minutes I heard the faint, pressurized fizz of a beer can being opened.

  Before it grew dark, Jim came to fetch me home.

  The world went on, I guess. I stayed in my room.

  I spoke to Phoenix, wherever he was. You didn’t tell me the truth. How can I ever trust you again?

  I knew in my heart that I had done a terrible thing. I had caused Logan to die.

  Hannah and Jordan called at the house.

  I stayed in my room.

  I didn’t want to see them. Christian texted the news that Logan’s funeral was fixed for Wednesday the twenty-seventh.

  ‘It’s been three whole days.’ On the Friday after Logan died Laura knocked on my door and came in. ‘You need to start to make an effort – take a shower, get dressed.’

  It felt like she was talking to me through a screen of clingfilm, opening her mouth to speak but not making any sense. I’d lost touch with time, with everyone around me and most of all with the Beautiful Dead.

  ‘Today is your session with Kim Reiss,’ Laura reminded me, already knowing that I wouldn’t keep the appointment.

  ‘How come the surgeons messed up?’ I asked her. ‘If they’d done their job, Logan would still be here.’

  ‘Honey …’ she began then trailed off with a sigh. ‘Here’s a fresh towel. I’ll turn on your shower.’

  I took the shower on auto-pilot, changed into clean jeans and T-shirt, caught sight of myself and turned my mirror to the wall. When I went to the window to raise the blind, a face was staring in at me.

  I gasped and stepped back. For the first time in seventy-two hours I escaped the net of the past and had a reaction to a real-time event.

  The guy had staring eyes. His lips were mouthing words at me through the glass. He rattled his fist against it until I thought it would shatter.

  I went and opened the window – first floor, remember. Staring-guy had stood on the roof of his car and used my window ledge to haul himself up. He’d grazed the knuckles of his left hand doing it. ‘What the—’

  ‘Listen to me,’ he hissed. ‘You have to do something for me.’

  The idea of prising the fingers of his bleeding hand away from the ledge entered my mind. I didn’t care that he would drop four metres to the ground. Then I noticed something else about him – namely his black T-shirt with the exploding skull motif.

  ‘I need to get into Summer’s concert,’ he snake-hissed – S-S-Summer’s cons-s-sert.

  Jeez, I went for the guy’s fingers big time. ‘Get the hell out!’ I yelled. ‘Jim, Laura, come quick!’

  I couldn’t make anyone hear and JakB hung on. I stared at his twisted face – the too-close-together, pale-lashed eyes and long nose, the big Adam’s apple jerking up and down as he fought to cling to the ledge.

  ‘I’ll blow my brains out if I don’t get a ticket,’ he threatened.

  Go right ahead, weirdo! Right now I had no softer side for him to appeal to. I raised my bare foot and stomped on his fingers.

  ‘Summer means everything to me!’ he grunted. He’d let go with one hand but still hung on with the other. ‘She needs me there with her!’

  I stamped down hard on hand number two, heard him let out a phlegm-thickened cry as he fell, then the thud of his body against his car roof. Leaning out, I watched him slither to the sidewalk. He looked up in agony, holding his wrist and pleading with me to join him, but the last thing on my mind was running downstairs to continue my conversation with Summer Madison’s ‘number one fan’.

  Next day, Saturday, Lucas came to the house in person and Jim let him in. The message was he wouldn’t leave until I came downstairs to talk.

  I wasn’t ready, but Lucas sat it out, even after Jim drove to the supermarket. Hearing Logan’s friend beat out a rhythm on the kitchen table drew me down in the end.

  Lucas had known Logan as long as I had. He was the one in the gang we kidded along with and sometimes made fun of, especially when he grew tall and gangly and seemed never to know where to put himself without knocking something over
or banging into stuff. Plus, because he didn’t know how to dress other than in sloppy T-shirt and faded jeans, Lucas was not considered sexy or cool. In other words, I really liked the guy.

  And I was shocked when I saw him sitting at the table, tapping his fingers. He looked like he’d been crying and was about to start again. I went and sat down by his side.

  ‘Say it didn’t happen,’ he begged.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  ‘Darina, it did not happen.’

  ‘It did,’ I whispered.

  ‘When you found him – how did he look?’

  ‘He was awake. I told him he was going to be OK.’

  Lucas swallowed hard. ‘Was he in pain?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I told him a couple of times not to leave, but he wouldn’t listen.’

  No, this is too hard. The memory net was closing round me, pulling me back in.

  ‘He saw you drive by in the storm so he set out after you. A big bunch of us – Christian, Parker, Ezra, a few others – were hanging out in Christian’s dad’s cabin, waiting for the rain to stop. I said, “Stay here, dude,” but he set off after you.’

  ‘I know. Believe me, I couldn’t feel worse than I already do.’

  Lucas stared at me for a while. ‘I do believe you, Darina. But Logan wouldn’t want that. One of the reasons I came here was to say no way would he have blamed you.’

  ‘Thanks, Lucas.’ Clumsy, clunky Lucas was the one trying to rescue me from myself. I reached out to stop his fingers from drumming, then held on to his hand.

  He grasped my hand back, his long fingers wrapping tight around mine. ‘The funeral’s Wednesday.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Logan’s dad has asked the guys to carry the casket. He wants the girls to play guitar and sing songs.’

  ‘Who’s organizing the music?’

  ‘Hannah and Jordan. They asked me to ask you …’

  ‘To sing?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, Logan would love for that to happen.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I promised.

  And we both cried in my kitchen until Jim came home with the groceries.

  The song I rehearsed for Logan’s funeral service was Summer’s new song, ‘Time to Go’.

  I pulled the slip of paper out of my jacket pocket, unfolded it and flattened out the creases. The words were perfect for the occasion: ‘There’s a hill / I’ll wait until / The stars appear / And the sky grows clear / Then it’s time for me to go.’ And the chorus: ‘I loved you so / But it was time to go / You spoke my name / I never came / ‘Cos it was time for me to go.’

  I sang and played softly until my voice grew into the sounds and my fingers stopped fumbling with the notes. I practised all through Saturday night and the whole of Sunday, ready to go into school on the Monday to perform it for Hannah and Jordan.

  It was only the song that got me out of the house at last. I stepped on to the porch and the spring sun dazzled me so much that I had to put on my shades. I turned left out of the drive to avoid Logan’s block and made myself focus on getting to school for the midday rehearsal. I parked in the grounds next to Lucas’s black SUV.

  Inside the building, I avoided eye contact with students and teachers, who greeted me with sympathetic smiles. Everyone knew it had been me that found Logan on Foxton Ridge, but nobody except Lucas and the gang who were at the cabin knew the details. I walked through the main block into the theatre.

  Jordan spotted me at the top of the raked auditorium. I waited as she climbed the wide steps. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  ‘No. But thanks for talking to me.’ I was more than ready to take the blame from the girl who’d been dating the boy I’d led to his death.

  Jordan sighed. ‘We’ve been using Summer’s music to get us through this,’ she explained as she led me down past rows of hinged seats. ‘You wouldn’t believe it but we’re almost ready for the concert already – five days ahead of schedule.’

  I stopped her beside Row D. ‘Will you sing at the funeral?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Logan was your buddy,’ she told me. ‘We dated, but I always knew he belonged to you.’

  ‘Sing anyway.’ I took out the ‘Time to Go’ music and showed it to her. ‘It’s a new song by Summer. I found it between some other sheets of music when I visited the Madisons’ house.’

  Jordan took the paper. She chewed her bottom lip as she scanned the lyrics. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t want to do it alone.’

  ‘So we’ll ask Hannah, we’ll sing it together, the three of us.’

  I didn’t deserve for people to be so nice. As Hannah, Jordan and I studied the new music together, the concert rehearsal went on around us. In one corner of the stage I could hear Lucas practising the guitar solo that he’d taken over from Logan. In another, Parker wiped his hands on his dark T-shirt before uncoiling heavy cable and plugging wires into a battery of sockets lined up along the front of the stage. ‘Did anyone see Ezra?’ he yelled to some guys out of view backstage. ‘I need some help here!’

  Halfway through the rehearsal, right after Jordan and I sang the backing vocals for Christian, Miss Jones called a break. She gave us fifteen minutes – time for me to split from Jordan to get some air. ‘Are you feeling OK?’ she called after me.

  I was heading across the stage, aiming for the side door. ‘A little dizzy,’ I admitted, pushing at the big exit sign.

  Outside I needed my sunglasses again. I’d reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and put them on before I saw Ezra Powell leaning into a red saloon car to talk to the driver. A couple of seconds later it registered in my slow brain that the red car had a buckled roof and it belonged to JakB. A stab of alarm made me hurry across.

  ‘Ezra, don’t talk to him, he’s crazy!’ I warned. ‘If he’s asking for a ticket, don’t give it to him!’

  ‘Too late, baby. I got a backstage pass.’ JakB reached out to show me the square of blue paper in his fist. He waved it in my face then snatched it away before I had time to grab it.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I turned on Ezra, for the first time realizing that maybe he and JakB had some silent bond – hence the shared taste in black goth T-shirts. ‘This guy is seriously weird. Hannah informed Miss Jones about him. We don’t want him anywhere near the concert.’

  ‘Says the law according to Darina.’ Ezra swatted me off, then stood back to let JakB pocket his pass and roar away.

  I could see Ezra’s smirking lips but not the eyes behind the dark glasses.

  ‘It’s cool, Darina. I had a spare pass. Where’s the problem?’

  As I watched the back of Crazy Fan’s car disappear out of the school grounds, I flipped. ‘The problem is you, Ezra. You live in a techie bubble. If you took a look around and listened for one second to what people were saying you’d know that the guy is a total freak!’

  ‘So let the security guys handle him,’ Ezra shrugged. ‘If he steps out of line, that is.’

  ‘If!’ I yelled. ‘The guy is permanently out of line. Didn’t you hear me? He hassled Hannah, he came to my house and tried to climb through my bedroom window. Go read his comments on the angelvoice website, come back, look me in the face and tell me he’s sane.’

  ‘You’re overreacting.’ Ezra didn’t wipe the smirk off his face. In fact, it was plain he was enjoying this.

  ‘OK, you want to know more about the freak you just invited through the door? He’s death obsessed. He thinks he can communicate with Summer beyond the grave – he actually said it. And you know something, he could even be the guy who went to the mall and pulled the trigger on Summer!’

  Ezra gave this time for thought, turned to walk away then came back. ‘Is there any evidence?’ he asked. ‘Or is this another Darina law you just made up?’

  Through the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday I stayed lost in Summer’s music.

  In the school theatre, in between run-throughs of the tribute con
cert songs, Jordan, Hannah and I perfected ‘Time to Go’. Back home, I continued to work on ‘Red Sky’ and ‘Invisible’. This way I successfully blocked thoughts of the Beautiful Dead.

  On Tuesday evening I opened my closet doors to decide what to wear for Logan’s funeral, taking out a short black skirt and plain grey top. I would wear these with black tights and my knee-high black boots with the straps and silver studs – Logan always said he liked those boots. I was looking through the contents of my jewellery box for a silver necklace when the TV in the corner made a shock announcement.

  ‘Breaking news on the Scott Fichtner serial killings,’ the link person on Allyson Taylor’s news station announced. The strip of moving text on the bottom of the screen confirmed the name. ‘Police in Brooklyn have released without charge the suspect in two fatal shootings. They say that twenty-year-old Fichtner, who has a history of mental illness, is an attention-seeking fantasist and there is no hard evidence to connect him with either the Venice incident or the homicide in New Jersey. This blows wide open police investigations into the two shootings, plus several other copycat incidents …’

  I switched off the TV and sat down on my bed to absorb the news. How did that happen? How had I managed to convince myself one hundred and ten per cent that Fichtner was guilty?

  Because I’d wanted it to be true, that’s how. I’d told myself that Fichtner would cave in under police questioning and there would be a confession before the Saturday anniversary, because that way Summer and her parents got the peace they needed, the freedom to move on without me needing to act.

  Idiot! I told myself. I hadn’t let this happen with Jonas or Arizona – I’d stayed right in the middle of the action. This time though, the mall shooting had felt too random and overwhelming – and then there was Logan.