All Unquiet Things (3 page)

Ribelli attended Brighton Day School in Empire Valley. She was the only child of surgeon Paul Ribelli and his late wife, Miranda.

The victim received a significant inheritance after the death of her grandmother. Police suspect that her uncommon wealth might have been a motive for her murder.

That was all the article had to say: Carly, her age, her parentage, her murder, and her money. Everything that mattered. Carly’s inheritance came from her widowed grandmother on her father’s side, who, due to some rift nobody really liked to talk about, skipped her two sons in favor of her granddaughters—Carly and Audrey—when it came to bequeathing her fortune.

There were two details that never made it into the papers;
they had nagged at me from the very beginning, but the police had suppressed them, perhaps because they didn’t fit perfectly with their theory. The first was the complete lack of fingerprints on Carly’s cell phone, which had been found in the front pocket of her jeans. The second was that, along with the gun that had killed her, a waterlogged digital recording device like the ones used by journalists had been dragged up from the bottom of the creek bed. Carly had owned one exactly like it, and when her bedroom was searched for evidence it had not turned up. It was obvious, at least to me, that the recorder belonged to her and that she had had it on her the night she died.

This was an early article, written before the police officially stated that they had a suspect in custody, before they arraigned and charged Audrey’s father, before the town was invaded by a media circus and Carly’s face was splashed all over the front page of every rag in the country.

I was the only person connected with the tragedy who didn’t talk to a single reporter.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Eighth Grade—Fall Semester

I
was admitted to Brighton for my eighth-grade year a few weeks after school had started. My parents had been trying to get me in for years; at first, they had assumed it would simply involve filling out some forms—my father was an alumnus, after all—but they had underestimated how popular private education had become in the East Bay after the toll that decades of education cuts had taken on the public school system. Brighton was filled to capacity. Eventually, however, a letter arrived congratulating me on my admission. Upon reading it, my father said, with a wide smile, “Somebody must’ve gotten expelled.”

The Friday before I was supposed to start, Mr. Finch insisted on meeting with my parents and me. Back then, Finch’s
office was across the hall from where it is now. He was vice principal at the time, and his superior, Dr. Darling, was more of a phantom presence than an actual person. For all intents and purposes Finch ran the show. My father talked about him like they were old Brighton comrades, but the truth was that Finch hadn’t attended Brighton, or any school even remotely like it—he was a proud graduate of PS 145, then rough-and-tumble Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, New York, before going on to Columbia and Yale. He was a wrong-tracks success story, and he meant for people to know it.

Finch was a broad-shouldered man who stood about six foot four and terrified the living daylights out of prospective students, and sometimes their parents. Our apprehension was largely unnecessary; unless a student was trouble, Finch was pretty fair. He especially loved the really smart Fund kids, doted on them, because they reminded him of himself. They were tenacious, grateful, eager to please. For so many students, Brighton was seen as a right—Finch liked those who saw it more as a privilege.

I was certainly one of the latter, despite my father’s wealth. Being wanted by someplace that could have rejected me was more than a little thrilling. Until then, everything in my life had been rather compulsory—no-cut sports were forced to take me, even sometimes to play me; the Catholic grade school I was attending couldn’t afford to turn me away; even my interpersonal relationships were either determined by genetics or engineered by a gaggle of socializing mothers. But Brighton had wanted me. I was chosen.

Overnight, fear and guilt had hardened into a block of pure anxiety. On the way to Brighton, my mother asked several times what was bothering me, but I couldn’t articulate it. I certainly
wasn’t excited to see my father. I still suspected I might not live up to the expectations set by my acceptance to Brighton. I had been a standout student at my old school, but even my intelligence could be matched, and if there was any school in northern California where I could go from brilliant to ordinary it was Brighton. My father wouldn’t stand for ordinary.

Like many California high schools, Brighton was a compound of low, squat buildings arranged around a quad where the students hung out between classes and ate lunch. At its inception, the school was modeled after the more traditional private schools on the East Coast, but the sixties and seventies had given it a hippie glaze. About fifteen years before I started classes, the board of directors had all the old brick buildings torn down and replaced with hip, sleek concrete ones with lots of sea green glass. The landscaping had been allowed to grow semiwild, in keeping with the natural environment of the foothills, and was only trimmed back twice a year—on Parents’ Day, and right before graduation. Adjacent to the quad stood the library, which was surrounded on all sides but one by covered banks of lockers.

As I walked between my parents toward the building where Finch had his office, I saw Carly. I had no idea who she was, of course. It was lunchtime, and most students were milling around several outdoor tables, laughing and gossiping, teasing one another and eating. We walked around the quad at my request, passing through a smaller courtyard where there were only a few tables, all but one of which was empty. That’s where Carly was sitting. She was reading, dark hair cascading over her shoulders, one leg tucked under the other, lips slightly pursed, a half-eaten apple in her left hand. Her right hand was holding the book open at the spine. I can’t explain it, but I
knew at first sight that we were two of a kind. Sitting alone like that, reading—that was the way I got through school.

My father stopped for a moment to point out the direction of the field house, because I was considering running track, but I left the job of listening to him to my mother and kept my eyes on Carly. She was pretty, but not so gorgeous that you couldn’t look at her. Her face was round, her body soft and curvy, but those eyes were sharp and focused, the eyes of a person who saw the value of things. She took a large bite out of the apple and wiped away the juice with the back of her hand. She looked up, and our eyes met; her expression was the sort that you see on the face of someone who remembers you fondly, even if many years have passed since you last met.

Mr. Finch greeted us far more formally. For an administrator of a school where students were instructed to address teachers by their first names and dress to express themselves (although there was a dress code in place to prevent actual nudity), he was much stiffer and more conservative than I had expected him to be.

“Neiland, you go ahead and have a seat across from me there,” he said, pointing to a chair.

I cleared my throat. “You can call me Neily,” I told him.

Finch nodded and leaned forward in his chair. “Do you like St. Mary’s, Neily?”

I looked at my father, who nodded encouragingly. I turned back to Finch and shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“Your father tells me that it’s not intellectually stimulating or academically challenging enough for you. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?”

“Sure.” I was bored at St. Mary’s and I was desperate to go to Brighton, despite my anxiety, but I had a hard time
understanding exactly why we all needed to be in this office, why my father was showing me off like some trophy he’d won. I was uncomfortable being the center of attention. I didn’t want to discuss
me—I
didn’t want to discuss anything, really, with Finch or my parents. I just wanted to be let off the leash.

Finch’s eyes flickered over to my father, who rolled his own and shook his head slightly. Finch sat back in his chair. “Well.”

I glanced at my mother. She gave me a small smile and jerked her head slightly toward my father. Fine. I was glad to have him continue to speak for me, to settle everything so I could get on with what I wanted to do.

“The thing is, Mr. Finch—I think we spoke about this on the phone—Neily’s schoolwork and test scores put him in the ninety-ninth percentile of children his age. We don’t want all of his potential to go to waste in some parochial school when it could be so much better realized here,” he said.

“I see,” Finch said, trying not to look too enthusiastic. “We do have a place for him, as you probably gathered from the letter I sent you. Brighton is an excellent school; our resources are greater than most other institutions’, and our students have a wide range of scholastic aptitudes and a large variety of interests. We also have a handful of very gifted students for whom we’ve developed a far more innovative program of study. I think it may suit Neily perfectly—if he’s willing to participate.”

My father beamed at me. “What do you think, Neils?”

“What sort of a program?” I asked.

“It’s very independent,” Finch said. My mother shifted in her chair. “I oversee the students’ progress, assign them work, make sure they’re following the curriculum that has been developed for them. They are supervised at all times during the
school day, but aren’t lectured to or tested as often as the other students. I believe—and most of the faculty agrees with me—that children who are so far advanced should be given space to learn, rather than strict guidelines to follow.”

For the first time, my mother spoke up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Finch, I don’t mean to be rude, but do you really think that giving Neily so much freedom will accelerate his learning? Can you honestly expect thirteen-year-olds to buckle down and do their work when there’s nobody breathing down their necks?”

Finch looked at her blankly. My father frowned. “Mrs. Monroe, I assure you, the program has been in place for nearly ten years now, and not once has it failed a student. I will gladly put you in touch with parents whose children participated, and you may ask them any questions you like.”

My mother nodded. “Yes, please. I’d like to do that.”

“Mom, come on,” I protested. I had my own reservations about the program as Finch had explained it. I was worried about making friends—if I was on my own ninety percent of the time, when would I meet people, who would I hang out with?—but I understood perfectly what Finch was getting at. This was a highly specialized, elite, and unconventional program, and he thought that
I
was smart enough to handle it. The part of me that was flattered, and the part of me that felt it was important to live up to the expectations of others, had won out, however marginally, over the part that was afraid of once again being the smart, odd boy who sat by himself during recess.

“Cathy, I don’t think that’s necessary,” my father said firmly.

But my mother stood her ground. “I would like to speak with a parent. I’m sure Mr. Finch understands that.”

“Absolutely.” His face, however, said otherwise. “I’ll have my assistant e-mail you a list.”

My mother smiled, satisfied. My father looked angry, but I wasn’t worried. The parents would tell my mother exactly what Finch had, and I would be allowed to make my own decision—to make my father’s decision, rather. I didn’t mind. For the first time ever, I was looking forward to school, and that had to mean something good.

Finch rose and shook my father’s hand. “Now, would you like to meet one of the others?”

The program was small, consisting of roughly a dozen students grades seven through twelve. We were supposed to attend two regular classes a day, and the rest of our time we spent in the library or empty classrooms, toiling away at our independent study projects. Each of us was assigned an academic mentor (Finch, for some reason, intended on being mine) and required to participate in one cocurricular activity, the implication being that things like student council would properly socialize us. The day I paid my visit to Brighton, the rest of the students were scattered here and there around the school—in gym class, or in a session with their mentor, or off studying something complicated somewhere private. Carly seemed to be the only one that Finch could locate.

We toured the campus, trailing far behind my parents and Mr. Finch. Carly was not shy with her feelings about Brighton and the program.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, “because I can tell you’re smart. I’ve been at Brighton since kindergarten, and almost
everybody is worthless. I keep telling Finch I’m going to drop out and go to Carondelet when I finish middle grades.”

I couldn’t imagine this girl at a strict Catholic high school, but it occurred to me that she dressed sort of like she already attended one. Though Brighton students didn’t wear uniforms, she had on a navy blue skirt that hung about two inches above her knees—when she bent down to pick up a book she had dropped, I noticed that she rolled it at the waist to shorten it, just like the girls at St. Mary’s—a crisp white short-sleeved button-down shirt, untucked, and scuffed black Doc Martens with white socks. Several of the top buttons of her shirt were undone and she wore a white tank top underneath that skimmed over the top of her breasts, providing a peek of cleavage every once in a while when she moved. The girls at St. Mary’s had just started to look like this the year before, coming back from the summer all tanned and curvy, to the overwhelming approval of us guys. But despite her appearance, Carly was in all other ways nothing like the girls at St. Mary’s. First of all, no girl at my old school had ever gotten this close, close enough that I could smell the spearmint from her gum on her breath, or notice the way the hair around her temples was curling up slightly in the heat. Second, she was easygoing and calm, and she made all my anxiety melt away with one well-placed eye roll and a friendly smile.