Beautiful Dead 3: Summer

  No! I wanted to yell at him, but nothing came out. I’ll never let Phoenix go!

  ‘Believe me, you will.’ Hunter’s eyes dug deep into me and seemed to read my unspoken thoughts. ‘Your connection with him will weaken. You’ll continue to miss him – every day at first, then every other day, every week, until you learn to move forward and live again.’

  ‘That’s not how it works,’ I said bitterly. ‘You don’t understand. I’ll always love Phoenix.’

  Hunter planned every move. He stretched his lips in a disbelieving smile and chose that moment to let Phoenix walk through the door on to the porch. A split-second later he let my knowledge of the Beautiful Dead flood back into my head.

  I fell to the ground again but this time Hunter permitted Phoenix to be there to catch me. The moment of our reunion had arrived – I was in his arms, but it wasn’t how I’d imagined it; we were just puppets with the overlord pulling our strings.

  Phoenix kept me from falling. He held me close and I clung to him until my head began to clear. He picked me up and carried me into the house, up the stairs to the bedroom where he laid me on the bed.

  ‘You’re going to be OK,’ he promised, bending over me so that his lips were against my cheek. ‘Hunter relented.’

  I could see him in the lamplight and raised my hand to touch his smooth, cold skin. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.

  Phoenix sat on the edge of the bed. ‘For what?’ He took my hand away from his cheek and kissed my fingers.

  ‘For angering Hunter. For messing things up.’

  ‘Hey, Hunter upsets real easy. You didn’t mean to do it.’

  ‘Don’t be nice to me! Tell me I’m an idiot for pushing his buttons.’

  He smiled warily. ‘You’re an idiot, but you’re my idiot.’

  ‘You make me want to cry.’ I lay with my head on the pillow, my face turned away. ‘I thought I’d be so happy – here, with you again!’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he pleaded, lying down beside me. ‘You’re here. I’m here.’

  ‘Where have you been, Phoenix? Why did you stay away? I know, don’t tell me – Hunter is the one who makes the decisions. You don’t get to choose.’

  Phoenix tilted my head towards him. ‘That’s the deal,’ he agreed. ‘We have to accept it.’

  ‘It doesn’t stop me wishing that it could be the way it was before,’ I whispered. With his body next to mine, his clear eyes looking at me, taking in every detail of my face, his fingers brushing my lips while I talked, I felt so close, like we’d never been apart. ‘Remember how we did things back then, with no one to stand in our way?’

  ‘I remember every second we spent together. It’s stored up here.’ He tapped his forehead then pressed the centre of his temples. ‘You know what I wish?’

  ‘What? That we had longer?’ Two months of Beautiful Dead reunions was all we had left. Eight and a half weeks.

  ‘That I could put it in a bottle and keep it. I don’t want a moment of it to slip away, not ever. I want your voice with me wherever I am, your eyes looking at me the way they do right now, arm in arm, side by side.’

  ‘You never told me this before.’

  ‘I never put it into words,’ he whispered. ‘But you already knew.’

  I nodded. ‘Let the heart speak – that’s what you once told me. But hearing the words is good too.’

  Phoenix’s smile grew warmer, got right behind his eyes and made them sparkle in the soft light. I felt myself melt as I leaned my head back and he kissed me.

  ‘Darina, I want you to meet Dean.’ Hunter introduced the new guy over the kitchen table, calling Phoenix and me down from the bedroom soon after Summer and Dean came back to the house. ‘Dean, Darina is the only person from the far side who gets to know about the Beautiful Dead. We trust her with our secret.’

  Was he mocking me, or was he genuine when he used the ‘trust’ word? I glanced at him but couldn’t tell, so I switched my attention to the newcomer – a heavy-set guy with a shaved head, whose open-necked shirt showed his death mark: the dark-blue angel-wing tattoo in the angle between his neck and his collar bone.

  ‘Dean is an ex-cop,’ Hunter went on. ‘A hundred punks and dope-heads wanted him dead.’

  ‘How did it actually happen?’ And why was he here? I knew you only got to be Beautiful Dead if there was a mystery that needed clearing up. You had to deserve to come back.

  ‘Car crash,’ Dean told me. ‘Severed the top of my spinal cord. Drunk driver.’

  I shuddered, wondering whether or not Hunter would want me to work for Dean on the far side and exactly where he was on the list – before or after Phoenix, Donna and Iceman? All I knew for sure was that Summer was next.

  ‘The culprit was never traced,’ Hunter said. ‘Dean had been following the car out by Amos Peak, ready to pull him over. The driver refused to cooperate.’

  ‘Which is the last thing I remember.’ Dean spoke like a cop – like he’d seen every bad thing a person can do and then some.

  I don’t know why but I felt that helping him might be harder than working for the others. Maybe it was the generation gap, or my particular problem with authority figures.

  ‘Except that Dean radioed in the car registration plate before the crash,’ Hunter added. ‘Which means the details should’ve been on record, but evidently someone in the office got careless.’

  ‘That piece of data was wiped from the computer, or it never got recorded,’ Dean said between gritted teeth. ‘No driver was ever traced.’

  ‘So Dean gets to come back and set the record straight.’ Hunter rounded up the discussion. ‘Keep it in mind, Darina. And remember, he died doing his job.’

  I frowned. ‘Summer is still priority, though? I mean, how many days do we have – twenty, twenty-one?’ Searching for her among the quiet figures in the room, I saw her standing by the doorway and went to join her. ‘I drove to your house, did you know?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘How was it?’

  ‘There were people there – Allyson and Frank Taylor, some others. A party.’

  ‘For my birthday?’

  ‘Yeah. They were cool, though. I can honestly say that no one cried while I was there.’

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘She held it together, even though she didn’t expect to see me.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Cool. He’s strong. I really like your dad, Summer.’

  What else could I tell her? That they hadn’t moved a single object in her room since she died, that her mom wasn’t painting any more. I avoided the deep stuff because there was no comfort there.

  She probably delved into my mind and saw it anyway.

  ‘So now we need to focus on you, Summer.’ This was Hunter speaking, and it was weird because he’d done one of his sudden shifts of tone from harsh to almost gentle. ‘Tell Darina everything you remember about the DAY.’ He said ‘day’ in upper-case letters so everyone knew what he meant. ‘And Darina, please give it your full attention.’

  Meaning, tear your mind away from Phoenix, forget about yourself and your own grief for a change. ‘Why do you always think the worst of me? What did I do?’ I wanted to protest, but a glance from Phoenix warned me off.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ Summer suggested.

  We had regular sleepovers when Summer was alive. Usually I would take my guitar to her house. We would hole up in her room, maybe play a song she’d just written, she would change a few notes or words, while I designed an album cover on Photoshop or wrote sleeve notes. We’d dreamed of her making the big time since we were ten years old.

  So we were used to looking up at the night sky together, star-spotting and working out which was Orion, getting it all wrong and saying, ‘Hey, there are a million stars up there. Who needs a name?’

  Tonight as we walked we saw two shooting stars.

  ‘So I’ll find your gunman,’ I promised. We were up by Angel Rock, out of sight of the barn and house. ‘If that’s what you want me to do.’

>   It was a long time before she reacted. ‘Sometimes I wonder what difference it’ll make to find out who did the shooting. Why not leave it at “Some crazy guy who ran away and who they never caught. End of story”?’

  But we both knew we couldn’t leave it hanging in the air like this. ‘And other times?’

  ‘Then I think it through and I know it makes all the difference in the world to the people I left behind.’

  ‘Your mom and dad?

  ‘My mom especially. She needs closure.’

  We walked on a while before I asked Summer something that was bothering me. ‘And you? Do you have any anger towards this guy?’ The guy who sprang out of nowhere and started spraying bullets around the mall. Scrawny Psycho Man with the peak of his white cap and a pair of shades hiding his face, not even aiming before he fired.

  ‘Anger?’ she echoed with surprise.

  ‘Why not? He stole your life. Don’t you picture all the stuff you could’ve done – the music especially. All just gone – wiped out. Don’t you hate him for that?’

  ‘No. I think of Mom and Dad and how their lives are on hold. That’s it. That’s why I’m here – to get the truth so they can move on.’

  ‘So I guess that’s me,’ I confessed with a sense of shame. ‘I’m angry for you.’

  Summer stopped on the ridge to look at me, the wind in her hair, an infinity of stars above her head. ‘All my life I wanted to be more like you, Darina.’

  I stepped away and shook my head.

  ‘Yes. The way you always know what’s right and what’s wrong, no grey areas. Me – I look from all angles and end up without a point of view.’

  ‘We’re different,’ I agreed. ‘But you’re the one with the talent. We all envy you. Actually no,’ I said straight away. ‘No way do we feel jealous. We all want you to be this big, big star, for the whole world to know you.’

  ‘We’re talking as if it might still happen,’ she pointed out, staring up at the sky.

  I took her hand and stood with her for a while. Then we walked arm in arm back to the house.

  The whole of the state police were still looking for Summer’s killer. It was a high-profile shooting, part of the cluster of deaths that launched Ellerton into national prominence and kept it there for months on end.

  ‘You need to dig deep,’ Hunter instructed before I left Foxton that night. ‘And this time you really don’t come back until you have something new to tell us – understand?’

  ‘Got it.’ My short answer came through gritted teeth. I held Phoenix’s hand more tightly.

  ‘Wait for us to come to you,’ the overlord insisted. ‘And be careful not to attract attention.’

  ‘Got it,’ I said again.

  ‘So go.’ Hunter turned his back and it was Phoenix who led me out of the house in silence.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asked, halfway up the hill.

  I shook my head. ‘This is cruel. Why can’t I come to see you?’

  ‘Because.’ His shrug conveyed the helplessness we shared. ‘Hunter tightened up on the rules,’ he explained. ‘He doesn’t want anyone following you out to Foxton – Logan or any of your buddies. You know what happens if someone from the far side finds out we’re here.’

  ‘You leave and never come back.’ It was a death sentence all over again. None of the Beautiful Dead ever got another chance to unravel the mysteries surrounding them. No one got justice or peace of mind.

  ‘So that’s the risk.’ Phoenix stopped as we reached the ridge where Summer and I had star-gazed earlier. ‘No one’s saying you got careless, Darina. Hunter’s looking at the laws of probability, is all.’

  ‘The more I drive out here, the greater the risk that someone follows me?’ This discussion, which pushed me kicking and screaming back into the grey world, was making me miserable. ‘Maybe Hunter should trust me more,’ I pointed out. ‘I’m getting pretty good at covering my tracks.’

  ‘I know, baby.’ With his arms around my waist, Phoenix pulled me close. ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Tell me you’ll still be here when I come back,’ I sighed.

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘Tell me you still love me.’

  This time he didn’t speak. He put it all into a long, lingering kiss that told me everything I needed to know.

  The next day, Sunday, I steered clear of Laura and Jim and took my laptop with me to a quiet coffee bar on the edge of town. I sat by the window, looking out on roofs and sidewalks still wet from snow melt.

  ‘Black coffee,’ I told the waitress as I logged on and typed Ellerton killings into the search engine. I wasn’t feeling good. Maybe the coffee would help with the headache left over from the day before and the shaky, hopeless feeling of being cut off from Phoenix until I came up with some good new information on Summer.

  I already knew there was a whole website devoted to recent events in town. It listed the deaths – Jonas Jonson, Arizona Taylor, Summer Madison and Phoenix Rohr, with pictures of each of the victims, together with short biographies and quotes from friends and families. The entire thing was a rubber-necker fest for people who got their kicks from sudden, untimely deaths – those onlookers who pick over details until they feel they’re somehow part of the story and write stuff on the site like Summer, I luv u so much and We’ll miss u 4ever. This was so not my thing. In fact, I felt queasy just accessing the site.

  But where else did I start with solving the mystery of Summer’s killing? I had to trawl through the tributes, the newspaper articles, police activity, autopsy report, even the reviews of her music and the links with her angelvoice website, looking for anything that jumped out.

  The waitress brought coffee and looked over my shoulder at the screen. ‘Are you reading about that poor kid, Summer Madison?’ she asked. ‘Did you hear her “Red Sky” track?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And the one about being in love with someone who doesn’t know you’re into them, and how that feels. What’s the name of that one?’

  ‘“Invisible.”’ I didn’t welcome the conversation – it was happening even though I’d turned my screen away and kept my shoulders hunched over my coffee.

  ‘Yeah, “Invisible”. So cool.’ Waitress-girl was still hanging around and hoping for a reaction from me. ‘Actually, I know Summer’s family. My mom was their housekeeper. She says there was music and guitars everywhere. She doesn’t go there now that Mrs Madison isn’t doing so well. Mom says she doesn’t like people poking around Summer’s old stuff.’

  I looked up over my shoulder. ‘I’m pretty busy,’ I told her.

  She nodded quickly. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘You didn’t. It’s cool.’ I waited for her to get back behind her counter then refined my search to find newspaper articles written at the time of Summer’s killing. There were dozens and systematically I began to read the reports, trying to keep my own feelings at bay and not to relive the nightmare moments.

  Friday, April thirtieth, four-thirty p.m. Lone gunman, random attack. Shot twice – once in the leg, once in the chest. The seventeen-year-old victim died instantly. Some facts were set in stone.

  I went on to interviews with witnesses – mall employees, friends of the victim, including the comments I gave to a reporter while I was still traumatized: ‘This is not happening. It can’t be true.’ The reporter states that I said the same short phrase over and over: ‘It can’t be true.’ Even though the ambulance had arrived and the paramedics had taken Summer away in a body bag, and the place was swarming with cops.

  Then I got into the police statements. There was the point twenty-four hours after the shooting when their investigation had thrown up a couple of unspecified leads. They were planning to interview everyone present in the mall at the time of the shooting, then a couple of days down the line they were spreading the net, appealing for any information about the missing gunman, asking the public to report anyone behaving suspiciously on the day of the shooting. Then, later still, they got
into searches of abandoned cars and buildings, and as a last resort they went to Allyson Taylor’s news station and recorded an appeal from Jon Madison, begging the killer to give himself up and give the family closure. Eventually, when that failed, they started to look out of state at copycat killings.

  I slowed down with the mouse action to read this part thoroughly. The local newspaper stuck with the crime long after it vanished from the nationals. On June sixth they reported a shooting in Venice, Florida. The same thing – the guy walked into a mall in late afternoon, wearing a black sweatshirt and white baseball cap. He didn’t aim before he fired. This time he hit three targets. Two people died, the third had serious chest injuries. And again the gunman got away. The Venice cops believed he’d parked his car close to the car-park barrier, straight out on to an intersection with five exits. He probably chose the coast road north to the Texas Panhandle, the fastest highway he could find.

  I read the report twice. The white cap grabbed my attention. I got a flashback of April thirtieth – Summer exiting the music shop, waving at me and starting to walk across the plaza, a wide-open target. The face of the gunman beneath the white peak – thin and wearing aviator shades. Why those ugly shades? I wondered at the time, in the seconds before he pulled out his gun.

  Now I sat and asked myself if the same crazy guy had driven south and chosen another mall. Had he driven from town to town until he found one with an easy escape route? Did he plan things this carefully, with chilling attention to detail?

  ‘More coffee?’ The waitress was back, snooping at my screen.

  ‘No – thanks.’ I clicked the Back key repeatedly. Ellerton killings came up. I was back where I’d started. This time I chose a new route and clicked on Ellerton – a town’s History of Violence.

  A journalist had written a special feature for a weekend magazine and it was reprinted here. He seemed to think there was something in the fact that a small town in the American Midwest had played host to more than the average number of killers. He claimed that the crime statistics put Ellerton in the same league as some of the major cities. ‘You can’t sleep safe in your beds’ was his message to residents. And as a matter of fact, he told us, this curse went way back, to the start of the last century and beyond.