Ecstasy (11 page)

His Nordic skull bobbed up and down. “If I remember right, her real name is Constance Dorchester Benson, or something equally
obnoxious. Direct descendant of Simeon Benson.”

“As in the founder of the college.”

“You got it.”

“Yikes. Go figure.”

O’Shaunessey reached for his Beer Nuts, housed in a helmet-size bowl kept behind the bar for his personal use. “So that’s”—he
counted on his meaty digits—“seven. Who’s the last one?”

“That would be Trish Stilwell. Her dad is the Jaspersburg chief of police—”

“Sucks to be her,” said Mad. His companions nodded.

“She seems like a nice kid, kind of quiet. So skinny it hurts to look at her. I think she and her dad are pretty close, actually,
though she tries to make herself out to be the rebellious teenager. Cody told me her mom’s been dead a while, so I guess he
pretty much raised her.”

“Tough,” O’Shaunessey said. More nodding from the peanut gallery.

“So,” Mad said with a familiar waggle of eyebrow, “which one was the foxy babe who ran on page one? You know, the one with
the long hair and the perky little gozongas?”

“Jesus,” I said, “you ever heard of the term
jailbait?
”

“Hey, she’s seventeen. You ever heard of the term
age of consent?
”

“I swear to God, Your Honor,” O’Shaunessey said at top volume, “she told me she was sixteen.…”

The three of them howled and pounded the tabletop, which was structurally unsound enough to make beer slosh from Mad’s recently
filled mug. He grabbed a napkin and wiped up the stinky brew with a surgeon’s precision.

“To answer your question,” I said, “that would be Lauren Potter. Kind of the cruise director of the bunch. Really good manners
for a seventeen-year-old, though I got the feeling she might be a bitch if you crossed her.” Mad made a meowing sound. The
other two found this the height of cleverness. “Seems like a pretty smart kid, though. I guess her parents are both profs
at the Benson med school.”

Mad stopped yowling. “Must be Mike Potter’s kid. He’s in pediatric oncology. So’s his wife. Linda …no, Lindsay. Lindsay Sherman.
That’s
their
kid?”

“I don’t know. If you say so. Why?”

“Neither one of them is much to look at.”

“Call it a genetic mutation. So I take it you guys’ve heard about the emergency edit meeting?”

“Yeah,” said Mad, and turned to the perplexed Irishman at his left. “Don’t worry,” he told him, “it doesn’t have fuck-all
to do with you.”

“Fine thing,” O’Shaunessey said, and stood up. “Who’s for another round?”

Hearing no dissent, he toddled off in the direction of the bar. “You got any idea what Bill’s got going?” Ochoa asked. “Like,
are we each getting assigned to a kid or something?”

I drained my second G & T in anticipation of a third. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, think about it. We’ve got a shitload
of stuff to cover.”

“Yeah,” said Ochoa, “you’ve got your standard teen memorial service, times three.…”

Mad rolled his eyes. “Crying chicks, autographed coffin, blah-blah-blah. If they play the theme song to
Titanic,
I’m gonna hurl.”

“I think that time is mercifully past,” I said. “But you’re right about covering all the funeral stuff. Plus, there’s the
news obits. I already filed a profile of the first dead kid before all hell broke loose. Now I gotta come up with something
on Billy and Tom by deadline tomorrow. Which, hopefully, you guys are gonna have to help me with.”

Mad put up a hand like a cop stopping traffic. “Hey, I’m gonna be all over the public-health stuff. County must be going crazy
trying to warn everybody off taking this shit, whatever it is. You can bet your ass they’re gonna want to be getting the word
out. Plus, maybe the CDC’ll get in on it. Christ only knows how much of this stuff ’s floating around out there, and it don’t
exactly respect state lines, if you know what I mean.”

I turned to Ochoa. “Fine. You can help me out with the—”

“Not so fast,
chiquita.
I’m the cops reporter, remember? I already got my hands full.”

“With what?”

He stared at me like I was playing dumb, then realized that I was being straight with him. “What are you, dense?”

“Apparently.”

“Jesus, Alex,” Ochoa said. “Three kids are dead from bad drugs. Don’t you think the cops might be just a little bit interested
in who sold it to them?”

I
’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me; I’m guessing it had a lot to do with the fact that I’d had roughly ten hours of
sleep in four days, topped off by a liberal amount of Tanqueray. But Ochoa was right. The fallout from the three Melting Rock
deaths wasn’t just going to involve keeping other psychotropic aficionados from killing themselves. It was also going to mean
tracking down whoever was responsible and (figuratively, at least) hanging them from the nearest tree.

Luckily, this wasn’t my problem. What very much
was
my problem, however, was covering the grieving rituals of several hundred adolescents. I was aided in this endeavor by two
other reporters, one of whom I didn’t actively despise. Lillian has covered local schools so long she’s interviewed the grandchildren
of some of her early subjects, and although she comes across as a sweet little old lady, she’s actually the deadliest interviewer
in the newsroom. I’ve always liked her, probably more than she likes me. Brad, on the other hand, is a journalist of the bull-in-the-china-shop
variety; his bottomless appetite for
National Enquirer
-style headlines has alienated just about every town father in Walden County. Come to think of it, though, it might be kind
of amusing to see him go head-to-head with that awful Mrs. Hamill from the Jaspersburg council.…

“…
and we remember him not only as a fine athlete, but as a hardworking student, a loving son, and a proud member of the community
…”

I’d let my mind wander, and I came back to the here and now with a thud. There I was, in the back pew at St. Anthony of Padua,
momentarily unable to remember just whose funeral I was covering. Lest I come across as horrifyingly callous, let me assure
you that I remembered in due course—even before I peeked down at the program I was holding and saw Tom Giamotti’s face staring
up at me.

And it really wasn’t that I couldn’t tell the kids apart; in fact, they were more distinct to me than ever. The point of obituary
writing is to make your subject come alive to the reader. My pieces on Tom, Shaun, and Billy had made them seem even more
like red-blooded human beings than they had before—well… before the aforementioned blood was replaced with embalming fluid.

I’m sounding flip again, and I’m sorry; chalk it up to the stress, the lack of sleep, and the fact that a snarky sense of
humor has always been my primary coping mechanism. The truth is, the three deaths had gotten to me way more than I’d expected.
I’d covered plenty of fatalities, from car accidents to suicides to out-and-out murders, but these felt especially awful.
And because I’ve been known to be the brooding type, I can tell you precisely why.

First off, there was the sheer volume; we’re talking not one death but three.

Then there was the fact that I’d met them, so their lives were automatically more vivid to me, greater than the usual sum
of details and quotes.

Also that their deaths were so blatantly senseless; if they hadn’t opened up their veins (or their lungs or whatever it turned
out to be) and ingested some recreational poison, they’d be off skateboarding somewhere as we speak.

And the kicker, the thing that really got me, was simple: They were just so goddamn, heartbreakingly
young.

Billy had been the last to die, but the coroner released all three bodies at the same time. For whatever reason, his funeral
was held first; it happened on the Wednesday after Melting Rock, in the tiny Jaspersburg Lutheran Church on Main Street. So
many people attended that their cars overflowed the parking lot and glutted the streets. For once, though, the local cops
didn’t seem inclined to give tickets.

There was a similar scene the next day at Shaun Kirtz’s service, held at the hippie-dippy Congregation of Consciousness, located
in what used to be a carpet store in downtown Gabriel. By the time it was Tom’s turn to be eulogized, his parents must’ve
realized space was at a premium. They moved the service from their small Jaspersburg parish to the biggest Catholic church
in the county.

So there I was in the back row, taking notes and (catechism dropout that I am) trying to remember when you were supposed to
stand and sit and kneel. In front of the altar was a white metal coffin that, sure enough, had been scribbled all over with
farewell messages in black Magic Marker. From a distance the writing was a blur, but I’d seen it at the wake the night before,
and a picture of it would run in the next day’s paper.
Love ya, Tommy,
some girl had written, with the
O
in
love
in the shape of a heart.
Keep on rockin’ in heaven,
someone else had scrawled, and so on. Honestly, it was all just too damn depressing.

Four of the five surviving members of the Jaspersburg Eight had attended the services—all except Cindy, who’d been in the
hospital until Sunday and was reportedly still deeply freaked out. But her brother, Alan, was there, looking stoic as he guided
Lauren, Dorrie, and Trish up the church steps. He seemed older all of a sudden, or maybe just miserable. Chief Stilwell was
at all three funerals too, sitting with several other uniformed cops and firemen. I also noticed Rosemary Hamill, who wore
another bulbous hat (black this time) and positioned herself smack behind the immediate family.

The teacher doing the eulogy for Tom Giamotti came off like he’d rather have his toes chopped off than speak in front of a
crowd. His talk was stilted, a passel of platitudes that made Tom sound like some kind of cardboard cutout of a high-school
student: good son, good friend, kind to children and small animals.

It was a damn shame, because from what people had told me, he’d been a hell of a lot more interesting than that. For one thing,
he was a talented musician who’d taught himself to play a half-dozen instruments. And he seemed like a genuinely nice guy.
When he took up drums, one of his teachers told me, he’d spent extra to get an electronic set so he could listen through headphones
and not bother the rest of the family. He was also crazy about his much-younger brother and sister, whom he baby-sat every
day after school; he’d insisted on doing it. When his parents offered to pay him, he’d turned them down flat.

Okay, it’s not that anybody goes out of their way to say something nasty about a recently deceased seventeen-year-old. And,
granted, nobody told me tales of Tom leaping tall buildings in a single bound. But there was something about the breadth and
depth of Tom’s little kindnesses that really got to me—everything from helping his sister learn to ride a bike to giving blood
on the first day he was old enough. He just seemed like, well… like if he’d had the chance to grow up, he would’ve been one
of the good guys.

I got out of the church ahead of almost everybody and waited on the sidewalk in case some decent color happened by as everyone
filed out. Nothing seemed worth writing about, though I did notice that four of the six pallbearers were too young for facial
hair. Tom’s parents came out last, and they looked as devastated as you’d expect. His mother seemed able to walk only because
she had her husband propping her up on one side and her priest on the other.

A boy and a girl of around eight were near them—Tom’s twin siblings, being shepherded by an older woman who, I assumed, was
their grandmother. The kids weren’t crying, exactly; they looked absolutely dazed, as though what was going on was just too
awful for them to process.

I was standing there watching Tom Giamotti’s mother being helped into a limo—and contemplating all the times I’ve argued the
pro-legalization thing, railing about individual rights and how drugs are a victimless crime—when Dorrie appeared at my elbow.
The other three were standing a few feet away; all of them had been crying, Alan included. Lauren, who had looked merely distraught
at the other two services, now seemed in danger of collapse.

“Are you going to the cemetery?” Dorrie asked. “You can ride with us if you want.”

“Um… Thanks, but I’ve got my own car.”

Just between you and me, the idea of being trapped with four sniffling teenagers was downright unbearable.

“But you’re going, right?”

“Yeah. I have to cover it for the paper.”

“And you’re coming to the house afterward?”

“What?”

“The Giamottis are having, you know, a get-together. At their place. His dad said to invite whoever we want.”

“Oh, God, no.”
It came out stronger than I’d intended, but… Jesus, even I know that invading a family’s privacy by sending a reporter to
the private reception is out of bounds.

“I’m sure it’d be okay,” Dorrie was saying. “You’re kind of our friend now, right?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “Er… Thanks, that’s really considerate of you, but I can’t. I have a deadline for
tomorrow’s paper.”

I gestured toward the weeping mother by way of emphasis, though this probably wasn’t in the best of taste.

“Well, okay.”

Dorrie fumbled in the pocket of her black trousers, then took out a tissue and blew her nose with a honk.

“You know,” she said, “I never went to a funeral before this week. Never even one. Isn’t that weird?”

T
HE WALDEN COUNTY CORONER
has always been something of a slowpoke when it comes to determining a cause of death, but this time he had a fire under
his derriere. Within two days of the festival’s premature end, he’d announced that the three young men had died from ingesting
tainted LSD—though what it’d been tainted with, he wasn’t saying.