Johnny Gruesome (31 page)

“Whoa,” Gary said. “Easy there, Erica.”

Eric breathed easier. “Don’t call me that.”

Gary shrugged. “Okay, whatever you say.”

Eric returned to his locker.

“Hey, Romeo, I hear you got your ass handed to you at The Bus last night. Serves you right for hanging out with those jocks.”

Go away,
Eric thought as he opened the locker door. “Oh, yeah? Who’d you hear that from?”

“It’s all over the school, man.”

Eric hung up his coat. “Do me a favor, will you? Leave me alone.”

“What’s wrong? Didn’t things go well with Rhonda last night?”

Arming himself with textbooks, Eric closed the locker and stepped closer to Gary. “Mind your own business.”

“Hey, relax. I give you credit for trying. It’s about time you made a move on her.”

“Like you made a move on Karen?”

Gary shrugged. “She’s available, isn’t she?”

“Congratulations.”

“Is that sarcasm I hear?”

“Not at all. I’m glad you got what you were after.”

Gary’s expression cooled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eric’s gaze did not waver. “Isn’t Johnny dead because you wanted to get into Karen’s pants?”

Looking around, Gary observed the policeman standing twenty feet behind them. “Keep it down, will you? What are you trying to do?”

Eric stepped even closer. “I’m trying to get rid of a bad itch. One that I’m tired of scratching.”

“I’m warning you, Eric: shut up.”

“What are you going to do—
kill
me?”

Gary glowered at him.

“Stay away from me. I don’t want anything else to do with you or Karen. If any more heads turn up in your locker, get her to help you.”

Gary grabbed the front of Eric’s shirt and twisted it. “Who do you think you are?”

Eric made a show of studying Gary’s M.C. “Who do you think
you
are?”

Gary spoke through clenched teeth. “This isn’t over.”

“That’s what you think.” Eric shoved him back with both hands.

With a surprised look on his face, Gary slammed into the lockers and bounced toward Eric, who drove his fist into Gary’s jaw. The look of surprise on Gary’s face turned to one of shock as his body slapped the floor.

Diving on top of him, Eric threw alternating punches, which Gary deflected with his forearms. Shouting students pressed around them, but Eric couldn’t make out their words. The anger toward Gary that had been simmering in his heart finally boiled over.

“Cut it out!” Gary said.

Eric felt himself being lifted off Gary and pushed away. The policeman had intervened. Gary leapt to his feet, his face bright red, and charged at Eric, but the officer held him back.

“Knock it off, both of you!”

Gary relented with an uncertain expression on his face. Eric just stared at him.

“You want to go to Mr. Milton’s office?”

“No,” Gary said.

The officer looked at Eric, who shook his head.

“Then both of you get to wherever you’re supposed to be.”

Turning his back on Gary, Eric strode away through the crowd. Despite his buckling knees and quivering lips, he felt better than he had all week.

Carol hovered between her desk and the blackboard, watching her homeroom students file in and take their seats. Her heart jumped when Eric entered. He looked as exhausted as she felt, which gave her reason to hope. Eric sat in his usual seat, next to Johnny’s former desk. One minute and a dozen students later, Gary entered. He did not appear to be suffering from sleep loss. In fact, he walked with a newfound swagger. With a defiant expression on his face, he sat on the other side of Johnny’s desk and neither he nor Eric so much as glanced at each other.

Trouble there,
Carol thought. Eric and Gary had never been friends; Johnny had been their bond. With him gone—dead—it made sense they no longer had reason to fraternize. But in the days following Johnny’s death, they seemed to grow closer—if not exactly friendly, then at least interdependent. Now even that had changed.

Rhonda entered last. Sitting in front of Eric, she smiled at him and said hello. He responded in kind, with a look in his eyes Carol hadn’t seen before. A constant observer, she’d witnessed countless high school relationships bloom over the years. She’d seen Eric gaze at Rhonda with subtle admiration, but believed him too shy to act on his feelings. Now something had altered the dynamics of their relationship. Eric tapped Rhonda’s shoulder and gestured with his head. Smiling, she stood up, circled around and took Johnny’s seat, much to Gary’s obvious astonishment and displeasure.

Sitting behind her desk, Carol opened her attendance book. In addition to her deceased students, she recorded nine absences. Parents deciding to keep their kids safe at home, no doubt.

Wait until they hear this news,
she thought as Mr. Milton’s voice descended from the ceiling.

“Thank you and good morning,” he said, the strain in his voice audible. “It’s my unfortunate responsibility to inform you all of another … tragedy.”

Poor Michael,
Carol thought. Three such announcements in just over a week. She scanned the pensive expressions on her students’ faces as they reacted.

“Oh, no …”

“Not again …”

“What now?”

Mr. Milton said, “Cliff Wright and Derek Delos died last night in an automobile accident.”

The whispers became gasps, and Carol studied Eric’s reaction. His face registered shock, and he and Gary broke their cold war long enough to exchange glances around Rhonda.

“Both boys were fine students and members of the wrestling squad. I know I speak for all of us when I say they’ll be missed. A double funeral will be held sometime next week.”

Pending autopsies, Carol thought.

“Todd Kumler’s funeral will be held next Tuesday. All after school extracurricular activities are canceled until further notice. Students will no longer be permitted to leave the grounds unless accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.”

You should close the school. We should close the whole damned town.

The bell rang and the students rose to exit. Eric and Rhonda waited for Gary to leave first.

“I wonder what happened?” Rhonda said.

“I don’t know.” But I have to find out.

“Mr. Milton sounded vague on purpose.”

“You’re being a reporter again.”

Rhonda smiled. “Sorry.”

Carol intercepted them at the door. “Eric, may I please speak to you for a moment?”

She had seemed anxious to him when he entered the class and now he knew why: she must have already known about Cliff and Derek. His eyes shifted to Rhonda. “Sure …”

“I have to get to my next class anyway,” Rhonda said. “See you later?”

Eric nodded. “Yeah, maybe at lunch.”

Carol closed the door behind Rhonda, then crossed her arms. “I’m sorry to keep you, but we need to talk.”

Oh, God,
Eric thought.
What does she know?
He envisioned himself being led out of the school in handcuffs. “About what?”

Carol drew in a breath, then plunged ahead. “I don’t exactly know how to put this, but has anything—strange—happened to you this week?”

Looking into her brown eyes, Eric saw pain, secrecy, and possibly fear. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She tried sounding casual. “Anything out of the ordinary.”

“Nothing about this week has been ordinary, Mrs. Crane.”

“You’re right. Let me rephrase that: has anything unusual happened specifically to you?”

She definitely knows something.
He didn’t know whether to feel relieved or worried. “Why do you ask?”

“I just thought that because you were Johnny’s best friend, you might have noticed anything peculiar that’s occurred since his death.”

Johnny.
That explained it. Or was she questioning him on Matt’s behalf? “Nothing I can recall. Has anything peculiar happened to you this week?”

Her eyes stopped blinking and for a moment she appeared to wrestle with a decision. Then she offered him an embarrassed smile. “No, of course not. Don’t be silly. You can go now. I’m sorry if I wasted your time.”

“You didn’t waste it.”

As he opened the door to leave, he thought he saw her shudder.

H
arold Lawson frowned as he pulled into the funeral home driveway. At 10:00 a.m., Willard had not yet cleared the five inches of snow that blanketed the driveway, even though they owned a top-of-the-line snowblower and the company truck had a plow attached to it. He released a slow, exasperated sigh as he drove around the house to the attached garage. Willard lived upstairs in the house, serving as caretaker, while Harold and his wife, Kitty, enjoyed a quiet life in their Spanish-style home on the outskirts of town, complete with a grape vineyard.

Willard had been a wild teenager, and the years following his high school graduation had been trying times. He drifted from one dead-end job to another, and one summer, while in the grip of an addiction to crystal meth, he had been arrested for disorderly conduct, drunken behavior, public exposure, and vandalism. Harold and Kitty were relieved when Willard straightened himself out and expressed an interest in the family business. Unfortunately, he possessed neither the acumen nor the ambition for anything other than menial tasks.

Using the remote control, Harold opened the garage door and eased his BMW into its regular spot beside the truck, which he allowed Willard to use. The garage door closed behind him as he walked through the stark white snow to the rear of the house. His frustration returned as he turned the doorknob: how many times had he instructed Willard to keep the door locked? He saw his son’s irresponsible behavior as a chronic liability.

Inside, he hung his hat and coat in a closet, then walked the hall, turning on lights in the various rooms. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading to the residential unit.

“Willard?”

No answer.

“Willard!”

Shaking his head, Harold retraced his steps to the middle of the house, where he opened a wide metal door and made his way downstairs to the basement. He turned on the fluorescent lights in the embalming room, making a mental note to have Willard scrub the surfaces that afternoon, before he transferred Charlie Grissom’s corpse from the county morgue. He glided through the darkness to the refrigerated storage room, light reflecting off the polished metal door. He’d navigated these same halls for nearly fifty years, ever since his father had started the business, and he knew every inch of the house, in which he’d grown up.

He pulled the door open and the room exhaled chilled air at him. He threw a wall switch and the overhead fluorescents flickered, casting harsh light on the stainless-steel interior. Standing within the low doorway, he frowned. Two bodies lay on metal carts, covered in canvas, with six feet of tiled floor separating them.

Harold narrowed his eyes. The room should have been empty. And it stank. As he approached the body on his left, the door slammed behind him, causing him to jump. He smiled at his paranoia: in all his years in the business, dealing with cadavers and coffins, he had never been spooked.