Ecstasy (18 page)

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “When you were taking something, did it ever occur to you that something bad could happen?”

Yet another pair of shrugs.

“Not really,” Lauren said. “I mean, people try to shove that ‘Just say no’ crap down your throat, but nobody takes it seriously.
Like, Officer Friendly comes and does the D.A.R.E. thing, and all he’s got to say is ‘Drugs are bad, bad, bad.’ Like, how
stupid do they think we are?”

“Meaning?”

“People talk as if alcohol isn’t a drug, or cigarettes. Even a cup of coffee is a drug, right? So obviously things aren’t
as black and white as they say they are.”

“So you never worried that what you were taking might hurt you?”

“Like I told you, we never took anything big. Just some recreational stuff—smoked some weed, did some E and some ’shrooms
and a little acid.” She spoke slowly, purposefully, like she was giving a speech for the debate club. “That stuff ’s no more
dangerous than drinking a beer. No way is it like snorting coke or doing heroin or something crazy like that. People try to
lump it all in together, but it’s not the same thing.”

“So you’re saying you’d never try those other drugs?”

“What are you, nuts?” she said. “That stuff ’ll
kill
you.”

N
EWS OF THE BOYS
’ not-so-accidental deaths hit the local airwaves promptly at six. We all stood around the newsroom television and watched
the video of the press conference, Ochoa eyeballing a slightly overexposed version of himself as the Nine News camera swung
around to capture him asking a question about the progress of the investigation.

The press conference had been run by Chief Stilwell, who looked like he was way out of his league. The guy wasn’t what you’d
call media savvy; he came across looking impatient and uncomfortable, like the school nerd who’d suddenly been asked to dance
with the prom queen. There was a much smoother guy on his right, who turned out to be some regional muckety-muck for the D.E.A.,
and who definitely knew which way the camera was pointing.

The nadir of the thing came when some lip-glossed minion from the Syracuse FOX station adopted an absurdly empathetic tone
of voice and asked Stilwell a whopping sob-sister of a question.

“Chief Stilwell,” she said, “can you believe this happened in your town?”

The camera had been focused on a three-shot of Stilwell, the D.E.A. guy, and the county coroner, a gaunt, gray-haired Benson
med school professor who rather looks the part. Slowly, they panned in on a tight shot of the chief, who looked like he was
debating between answering the question and eating his service revolver.

“No,” he said finally. “No, I can’t believe it.”

“Would you care to elaborate?”

The chief winced so noticeably that even the Nine News low-rent camera picked it up. The D.E.A. officer leaned in and whispered
something in his ear, and the chief ’s jaw clenched. It occurred to me that whoever the reporter was, she’d better not speed
through Stil-well’s jurisdiction anytime soon.

“Jaspersburg has always been a great little town,” Stilwell said finally. “It’s still a great little town. But before, I guess
we always thought …We thought we were immune from some of the things that happen in big cities. We thought we could let our
kids go out with their friends and have a good time and they’d come home safe.”

His voice cracked a little. The camera panned in closer.

“But now we know that isn’t necessarily true. We have to be on guard, to protect our young people from things that might hurt
them, things that they don’t even understand might hurt them. We have to teach them that… that even though it’s important
to trust people, sometimes too much trust can be a dangerous thing. I guess the bottom line is, we have to admit that the
world isn’t the same as it was when we were kids. And…I guess that’s a hard thing to know.”

The newscast cut abruptly from Stilwell’s last sentence to a shot of the Nine News reporter standing outside the Gabriel Criminal
Justice building—editing never having been the station’s strong suit. The reporter signed off, and the screen flashed a phone
number for anyone with information about the three deaths.

We all went back to staring at our respective computer screens—Ochoa working on his news story, Mad on the science angle,
me on the ridiculous color piece. Lauren and Trish had, unsurprisingly, been unwilling to give me specific names of other
friends I could interview, but they said they’d ask around and if anyone wanted to talk they’d have them call me. The phone
wasn’t ringing.

I was pondering crawling into Bill’s office to tell him there was no way the story was going to come together in time for
the next day’s paper when Ochoa’s phone rang. He answered it, and five seconds later, it was obvious something was up.

“Holy shit,” he was saying, “are you sure? When?” He listened for a while. “And you’re positive about this?” Another pause.
“When are they announcing it? Not until then?” He grabbed for a notebook and started scribbling furiously. “Don’t worry, I
can get it confirmed from down there. You’re totally out of it. Yeah, I promise. Thanks for letting me know.” He listened
for another few seconds, and I could swear he was starting to blush. “Yeah …I’d like that, but I’m gonna be here pretty late
tonight. Really? Okay, how about midnight? All right. See you then.”

He hung up, then kept jotting down notes until I threatened to throttle him.

“Come on, man,” Mad said, “What the hell is going on?”

“That was my source in the coroner’s office.”

“The one,” I said, “that you’re obviously having a drink with later.”

“Hey, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.”

“Poor baby. So what’d she tell you?”

“You sure you want to know? Or would you rather break my balls for a while?”

“It’s tempting.”

Mad wadded up a pink message note and threw it at me. “Would you two just get a room already?” He turned to Ochoa. “So come
on, what the hell’s up?”

“Okay, so obviously her boss was over at the press conference this afternoon, right? And apparently when he got back, there
was this urgent message from some doctor in Baltimore who wanted him to send everything he had on the stuff that killed those
kids. And guess why.”

He’d addressed the challenge to me, so I answered it. “Because there’s another one.”

“You got it,” he said. “But this one’s still alive.”

T
he girl’s name was Norma Jean Kramer. Her mother, as we’d later find out, had given her Marilyn Monroe’s original moniker
in the hope that her daughter would grow up to be a beauty queen. That hadn’t worked out so well, to say the least. At nearly
nineteen, Norma Jean Kramer tipped the scales at 220 pounds. It proved to be something of a blessing, though. Her weight,
plus the fact that she’d only taken half a tab of the acid, very probably saved her life.

But just barely. At the moment, the young woman was comatose in a hospital in Baltimore. Whether she’d ever come out of it
was anybody’s guess.

What, you may ask, could possibly have possessed her to take the drug, considering what had happened to the three boys?

The short answer is that she almost certainly didn’t know.

She’d left Melting Rock on Friday night, because the next morning she and a friend had tickets to fly to Orlando on a trip
that was a high-school graduation present from their parents. She’d spent the next week riding on the Jungle Boat and taking
pictures with Pluto. If any stories about the deaths filtered that far south, they completely passed her by. Besides, her
friends said later, Norma Jean wasn’t the type to watch the news.

Our piece about her hit the paper Saturday morning, a scoop that let us recover a little dignity after the previous day’s
humiliation. Ochoa had gotten confirmation on the record from the authorities in Baltimore, who didn’t seem the least bit
inclined to try to muzzle the story. To the contrary, actually: The case proved that more of the killer acid was floating
around, and everybody—including Norma Jean’s hysterical parents—wanted to get the word out.

Running the story also had some benefit for yours truly: It meant that my color piece got overset to Tuesday. It might’ve
run on Monday, but the paper’s overtime budget was already getting blown to hell. The four-day weekends I was promised in
recompense for covering Melting Rock never materialized, and there was no way Bill could afford to schedule me to work the
weekend.

So after crawling into bed after deadline (and, naturally, a post-deadline visit to the Citizen Kane) on Friday night, I woke
up Saturday morning with two days of leisure stretching gloriously ahead. I almost didn’t know what to do with myself.

It did occur to me that it might be a good idea to get some exercise, but I ignored the instinct in favor of thumbing through
Vanity Fair
in bed with Shakespeare. I read stories about rich people, murdered people, and rich people who’d been murdered, and while
I did it, I ingested several cups of coffee and a giant bowl of Banana Nut Crunch. Eventually, this level of sloth became
too much even for me, so I put on some sweats and took that most fabulous of all pooches for a walk around the neighborhood.

It was a gorgeous day, sunny and not too humid, so I forced myself to don my biking gear and go out for a spin. I’ve never
been the type who loves exercise—the concept of a runner’s high strikes me as a textbook example of self-delusion—but I do
enjoy my feed, and I’d just as soon not turn out like Norma Jean Kramer. So I shake my booty now and again, and lately the
mountain bike has seemed like the least agonizing way to do it. Not that I go up any mountains, mind you; the last time I
tried that, I found a strangled corpse in the woods and nearly cracked my head open. This girl sticks to the pavement nowadays,
thank you very much.

I went for a ten-mile toodle around the periphery of the city, avoiding hills to the extent that it’s possible around here.
I got back home around one and found Cindy Bauer sitting on my front porch.

She looked surprisingly okay for a girl who was supposedly grief-stricken and traumatized. The reason, however, turned out
to be not so much her own innate emotional stability as a hefty dose of Paxil.

Still, she didn’t exactly look normal. She’d laid on thick swaths of eyeliner, and they gave her eyes a weirdly startled expression.
Her purple hair had grown out, maybe just half an inch, but the contrast with her natural color (pale blond) made it obvious.
Said hair was hanging straight down, parted in the middle but unevenly, and the whole effect was of someone who had no idea
what they looked like to other people. In short, an adolescent.

“Hi,” I said, still panting as I wheeled my bike into the little shed next to the house. “Are you waiting for me?”

“Yeah, I…Your roommate said I could wait inside, but I didn’t feel like it.”

“Melissa’s up?”

“I think I woke her. I’m really sorry….”

“Don’t worry about it. She stayed out kind of late last night. Do you want to come in?”

“I…Um, it’s kind of nice outside. Can we stay out here? I haven’t been outside a lot lately.”

“Sure. Just let me run in and get a drink. Do you want something?”

She shook her head. I went in and got two cans of diet Sprite and some raspberry-filled granola bars, in case she changed
her mind. The pair of us settled onto the ancient porch swing, which had been one of the house’s major selling points but
which Melissa and I rarely had time to use. Shakespeare, who’d followed me back outside, stretched out on the wooden floor
and watched us glide back and forth; the expression on her face said humans were strange creatures indeed.

“So,” I said, “how come you came by?”

Cindy looked panicky all of a sudden. “Isn’t it okay?”

“Sure. I was just wondering why.”

The panicked look left her face, but it still took her maybe two full minutes to answer.

“Um…I heard Alan talking on the phone with Lauren about how you were writing an article about …I guess about kids who take,
you know… who take stuff. It kind of made me want to talk to you. But I wouldn’t want you to put my name in the paper or anything.”

Story of my life.
“That’s okay. I figured a lot of the interviews for this one would be anonymous.”

I stopped the swing from moving and stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“I just have to get my notebook.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll be back in thirty seconds.” I was. “Okay,” I said, “what did you want to talk about?” She didn’t say anything, just
watched the cars going by as the swing went
squeak-squeak-squeak.
She stayed like that until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Cindy?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come here. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”

“Listen,” I said, trying to sound as comforting as I could muster, “you obviously have something on your mind. You’ll probably
feel a lot better if you just go ahead and tell me.”

Another excruciating pause. “It’s just that …I never thought it would be like that.”

“Be like what?”

“Be so…” Her voice cracked, and tears started running down her pudgy cheeks. “I always thought it was just for fun, you know?
I never thought something that awful would ever happen.”

“You mean Shaun?” She nodded. “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“My parents… They just look at me like I’m
broken,
you know? And all they have to do is figure out a way to fix me and everything’ll be okay. But it
won’t…
”

Her voice trailed off into a sniffle. I waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t.

“I heard you might not want to go back to Jaspersburg High.”

She spun around to face me. “That’s not me; that’s
them.
I want to go back, but they don’t think it’s…What do they keep saying? That it’s not a healthy environment for me. But I
just… I just want things to be back the way they were.”