Never Tell (13 page)

“I know where you’re going with this. Absolutely
not. Ramona would never. We’re very close. You just said she was the one to call
you, for goodness’ sake.”

Once they obtained the IP addresses linked to the
other posts, they’d know for certain whether Ramona could have been involved,
but Ellie shared Adrienne’s assumption that the girl wouldn’t have called them
if she’d been the one responsible.

“You said yourself that Julia and Ramona were
extremely close. We’ve seen cases where teenagers lash out at their friends’
parents, without the victims’ own kids even knowing about it. You’re Ramona’s
stepmother, if I’m not mistaken?” Ellie was on a roll now, so Rogan was letting
her lead the questioning uninterrupted.

Adrienne’s eyes drifted upward and she shook her
head in frustration. “Unbelievable. I’ve raised that girl since she was seven
years old. She calls me Mom.”

“So you’ve legally adopted her?”

“No. It was never—it wasn’t necessary. It isn’t
necessary. She’s my daughter. We have a good relationship. She wouldn’t do
something like that. We are very open with each other.”

“And yet you had a secret in your past. And you had
a blog. And she even learned about that blog and that secret. But neither of you
spoke to the other about what you knew.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“And yet you don’t want to believe that Julia would
have posted those comments, either, but we’re telling you—she did.”

She took a deep breath before answering. “Julia was
a wonderful and generous girl, but she was also reckless. She had a darkness
within her.”

“Dark enough to post such horrible threats on your
website?”

“I don’t know what to think. In a way, it would be
nice to know that whoever is writing those comments isn’t actually dangerous.
But I have a really hard time believing Julia would do this.”

“You don’t seem all that troubled by either
prospect. We’ve seen the comments posted on your site.”
He
should have choked you harder.
That was from Monday morning. Then
Monday afternoon:
You were a good lay. Wonder what you’re
like now. Is that ass still tight? I might have to find out.
Monday
evening:
I will show you damage.
This morning:
I’m still here. I touch myself when I read your words. I’m
thinking about you.
Ellie had worked her share of stalker cases but
couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for a rape survivor to find those
words waiting for her when she turned on her computer.

“I’ve spent a long time getting past the things
that happened to me when I was younger. Writing about it has been the best form
of healing, after all of these years. I put it all out on the table—maybe not
with Ramona, because, however misguided this may seem, I want to preserve her
innocence. But on a page, in words, I’m laying it all out there. And I’ve
resolved not to let some idiot with a keyboard and the shelter of the Internet
get to me. All I can tell you is that I would bet my life that my daughter had
nothing to do with those vile comments. And I’m nearly as sure that empty
threats on my silly website have absolutely no relation to whatever happened to
Julia Whitmire. You can’t seriously think
I
did
something to her? I was at a fundraising dinner for breast cancer research out
in Sag Harbor that night, if you need to check on my whereabouts.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Mrs. Langston.
And I’m sorry if it sounded like I was questioning your relationship with
Ramona. But for now, we’re treating Julia’s death as a homicide. And when we
find out that a homicide victim was holding on to a secret, that secret often
sends us down the road to a killer.”

“It makes me very sad to say this, Detective, but
my guess is that you’ll find that Julia Whitmire was carrying around more than
one secret.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

N
elson the doorman had just finished putting an elderly woman and her pocketbook-size dachshund into a cab.

“You were right, Nelson. The Langstons seem like a very nice family.”

He smiled politely. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

“Ramona seems to get along with Mrs. Langston?” Unless Julia Whitmire had a reason of her own to threaten Adrienne, the most obvious explanation was that she was doing it on Ramona’s behalf, and that someone else was now continuing the pattern. “I’m sure at that age it must be typical for a teenaged girl to fight with her parents.”

“I just watch the door.”

Outside on Park Avenue, Rogan shook his head. “Seriously? You thought he was suddenly going to tell you all he knows? Like, some magic doorman interrogation code, where all you have to do is ask three times?”

She was too busy reading a text on her phone to bother with a comeback. “It’s from Max. He’s working on the subpoena for Social Circle.”

“Good. Maybe the IP addresses will tell us something.”

“In the meantime, was it just me, or is that woman in serious denial about those threats? She’s trying to convince herself they’re only words, but I could tell that part of her was terrified. She’s working so hard not to be scared that she refused to focus on whether Julia might have had some motive for posting a comment like that on her blog.”

“You’re not thinking of her for the perp, are you?”

“No, I don’t get that vibe. Plus, she said she was at a party in the Hamptons Sunday night. Easy enough to check that out. Add it to the to-do list.”

“Maybe she honestly doesn’t know,” Rogan said. “If she and Julia had some kind of beef, presumably she’d just tell us, especially if she’s got a rock-solid alibi.”

“Unless the beef somehow involved Ramona. She seems pretty protective over that girl. If Julia was lashing out at Adrienne on behalf of her friend, Adrienne might not want to admit there’s a rift in her perfect stepmother-stepdaughter relationship.”

“So let’s go talk to Little Miss Truant again.”

R
amona was waiting, as she had promised, on a park bench next to the playground by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was fiddling with her iPod but stood up and pulled out her earbuds when she spotted them walking toward her.

The words started tumbling from her mouth before they had a chance to speak. “Did you talk to her? Does she know who’s threatening her? Are you going to be able to find out who’s doing this?”

Ellie pointed to the bench, and Ramona returned to her seat. “Slow down for a second, okay? So, we talked last night about the importance of your being extremely honest with us about Julia.”

“Of course.”

“We need to know: Did Julia have a grudge against your stepmother?”

The girl’s mouth moved but nothing came out. She looked like a beautiful goth puppet. “My mom?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you even ask that?”

Ellie was starting to wonder herself. First-year cops learned the maxim of Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation was also the most likely. When you’re in Kentucky and hear hooves, think horses, not zebras. Here they had a dead high school girl in the bathtub and an Upper East Side housewife receiving online threats. Because Julia had posted the first threat, they’d automatically concluded the two events were related. Made sense. But maybe the threats were just one more indication that Julia Whitmire was, as Ramona had put it, the fucked-up head case who killed herself, while some mean-girl friend of hers was continuing to wreak havoc against Adrienne now that Julia was gone.

Rogan was the one who broke the news. “When you called us about your mother’s blog, we were completing a search of Julia’s computer to see if we could get a better idea of the circumstances that might have led to her death. Those offensive comments on your stepmom’s blog? Well, it turns out that Julia’s laptop was used to post one of them the night before she died.”

“That’s impossible. She didn’t even know about my mother’s blog. I just found it today.”

“You may not have been aware of it, but Julia apparently was. We searched her computer.”

“You can’t know that she’s the one who posted it, though, right? It just means it came from her laptop. So whoever’s still posting those threats against my mom somehow knew Julia?”

“That’s right,” Ellie said. “We’re trying to figure out who that might be.”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t even seem possible.”

“This might be hard to talk about, but if there’s a simple explanation for this, we need to know about it. Ramona, is there
any
chance that maybe you were having some kind of tension with your stepmother? If Julia was aware of a fight between the two of you and stumbled upon the website—”

“No. No way. I mean, I know you keep saying she’s my stepmother, but I call her Mom. I always have. And, I love my dad and everything, but you met him. He’s—well, he’s, like, you know, lucky to have found her. And so was I. That’s why I was so freaked out when I saw those comments. We’re, like, really
close.
I couldn’t believe she didn’t tell me. No way would Julia do something like that to her.”

Ellie still didn’t know what to think about the possible connection between Julia’s death and the comments on Adrienne Langston’s blog, but she was convinced that, if there was a connection, Ramona certainly didn’t know about it.

Chapter Twenty-Six

K
atherine Whitmire threw yet another dress on Julia’s bed. The pile of clothing was now three garments wide and at least ten deep, its own weight threatening to pull it from the comforter to the floor, a heap of imported fabric, designer labels, and cedar hangers. Never mind, she would stand here all day building a wardrobe tower if she had to. You only dressed your daughter for her coffin once.

She reached for another dress at the back of the closet. This one wasn’t a candidate for the burial outfit, but Katherine remembered buying it three years earlier.

Bill had promised to take Julia and Ramona backstage to a Justin Timberlake concert. Not the dime-a-dozen backstage passes, he had boasted. The
real
passes, for insiders. The ones that put you right next to the artist—not just for a quickie photograph and a shuffle to the nearest exit, but for however long the after party lasted.

It had been a big deal for the girls. Sure, Julia and Billy were both used to being carted around to industry events with Bill. There were some months when that was their only time with their father.

But the Justin Night, as they’d called it, wasn’t about Julia being in tow just so Bill could multitask parenthood with work. Justin Night was Bill going somewhere he’d never otherwise choose to go, just because it meant something to his daughter. On Justin Night, Bill’s professional identity—instead of taking him away from his family—would actually work to Julia’s advantage for once.

The day had started well enough. It was summer. Katherine had gone back to the city in the car with the kids in the morning. Bill was scheduled to meet one of the long-term artists on his label for a casual lunch at Cyril’s, then planned to take a helicopter in time for the concert.

She started worrying when she hadn’t heard from him by five o’clock but tried to hide her concern from the girls as they practiced their dance moves to “SexyBack” in the foyer. She started calling Bill’s cell phone at six. By seven, the girls were worried they wouldn’t have time to buy T-shirts from the stadium vendors before the opening act started. And by nine, Julia had locked herself in the bathroom to cry. They all knew he wasn’t coming.

Bill had all his excuses prepared when he finally showed up at eleven, wearing a fresh shirt and still smelling of soap. That drama-king of a singer-songwriter had shown up drunk at lunch and continued to get drunker as they dined. He had to drive him out to Montauk to make sure he made it home in one piece. Then the man’s latest wife had bent his ear about the crappy sales of his last album. Then he missed the last helicopter.

None of it explained why he hadn’t answered his phone. None of it explained why he’d broken his daughter’s heart.

But as angry as the Whitmire girls had been that night, Bill had somehow managed to get himself back in their good graces the following day. He woke them both at eight a.m., declaring it Julia Day—“Trust me,” he’d said, “Julia Day kicks Justin Night’s skinny white ass.”

The driver was already at the curb, waiting to take them to breakfast at Norma’s, where the kitchen had Julia’s favorite banana-macadamia flapjacks all ready to go. Bill even let thirteen-year-old Julia have a mimosa, though when Katherine balked, he assured her the drink was heavily orange-juiced.

From there it was on to Bliss Spa, where even Bill participated in the mani-pedi-facial-mudbath combo. When Julia laughed at the sight of her father sticking out his pink tongue from a mask of green clay, it was a childlike belly giggle like Katherine had not heard from her daughter since grade school.

And then the crowning moment of Julia Day had come with this dress. This crazy, beaded, one-shoulder-strapped, hot-pink monstrosity.

Bill had led Julia through the Nina Ricci department at Barneys, covering her eyes with his palms.

“Bill, what did you do?” Katherine had asked. “Where are we going?”

As futile as it was, Katherine did try not to spoil the children. When it came to clothing, it’s not like Julia was shopping at the Gap, but Katherine had so far managed to keep her
Vogue
-obsessed little girl away from the adults-only couture that she so desperately craved.

Katherine remembered the squinty-eyed stares of her annoyed fellow shoppers when Bill had finally uncovered Julia’s eyes. The girl screamed. Literally screamed, that high-pitch squeal that only young girls and certain large birds are capable of making.

“Daddy! How did you know?”

How, indeed, had he known? The previous night—while Julia had been completing another round of bawling in the bathroom, and Katherine had been slamming cabinets in the kitchen—multi-Grammy-winning producer Bill Whitmire had pored through the stacks of fashion magazines on his daughter’s nightstand, noting the dogeared pages, searching for the most extravagant, expensive, completely over-the-top magnet of his daughter’s attention. His wife had no idea Bill even knew that Julia liked those magazines. Or where she kept them. Or had a habit of folding corners on the pages that best captured the look she so longed to have, and which her mother would not allow.

Julia had emerged from that dressing room like a future princess, ready for the offical engagement announcement.

“You look beautiful, Baby J.”

“Amazing, Julia. But, Bill.” Oh, how Julia’s face had fallen with just those two words from Katherine. But, Bill. “Where is she going to wear something like that?”

“I was thinking she’d fit right in at the VMAs next month. I think Justin might even like it.”

Julia’s eyes opened to the size of saucers. To a thirteen-year-old girl, the MTV Video Music Awards were like the Super Bowl.

“I made some calls this morning. We’ll be sitting right next to him. What do the Whitmire ladies think of that? It’ll be all three of us together.” He pushed Katherine’s hair aside and planted a soft kiss on the side of her neck.

“Do I get a five-thousand-dollar dress, too?”

“Whatever you want, my love.”

Katherine had stopped telling those stories to her friends a long time ago, because she knew how they sounded. But at the time, days like that with Bill made her so incredibly happy, that all of the wrongs he was trying to make up for somehow fell away.

Even now, she found herself smiling as she held that dress out in front of her. She was surprised Julia had hung on to it. The dress had worn out its fashionability long ago, and Katherine was pretty sure it wouldn’t have even fit Julia after that summer, when her chest had suddenly sprouted another cup size.

Julia must have remembered that day at Barneys, too. She must have kept this ridiculous dress because of that memory. Now it was just another item of clothing to go in the charity stack. Onto the pile it went.

Money. It had taken Katherine years to adjust to having
this
much money. But eventually she’d come around to Bill’s view that money might not buy you happiness, but it sure could solve your problems. Busy? Hire an assistant. Too much traffic to the Hamptons? Get the helicopter. Sick of the city? Build your own recording studio. Stand up your daughter? Buy her a dress.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that the idea of hiring a private investigator had come to Bill last night. And given that her husband gnawed at an idea like a dog with a bone, it wasn’t surprising that he had already made the necessary calls about the big reward before she’d managed to drag herself from bed that morning.

As she understood it, they had a designated number for the tip line. Bill’s PI firm would handle the incoming calls. The head guy—Earl Gundley—was a retired cop, with contacts in the NYPD, but who worked solely for them. Bill had his publicity people put out the press release.

She pulled another dress from the closet. This one was a bone-colored, cotton-lace sheath by Stella McCartney. This would be a nice choice. Simple. Timeless.

She hung the dress on a hook inside the closet door. She’d ask Billy to take it to the funeral home in the morning. He was looking for ways to be helpful, and Katherine had seen more than enough of that place when she’d chosen the casket this morning.

She barely heard the sound of the doorbell above the music blaring from Bill’s office. She heard the stereo volume drop, followed by muted voices three floors below. Then she heard Bill’s voice in the intercom he never used. “Katherine, I think you need to come down.”

“What is it, Bill? I’m busy up here.”

“I know, but I think you’ll want to hear this too. The press release worked. There are two people here who say they know what happened to J.”