True Blue (2 page)

Mom got on the phone the minute we walked through the door.

“You release that girl this instant! What do you mean by arresting her in front of the whole town like that? Did you even think about her poor parents? Well, it’s your department I feel sorry for, because you are going to be hit with such a lawsuit—”

The cop at the other end of the phone let Mom rant. A wise move. Mom’s a ranter, even when she’s not ill. She has to get that first rush of adrenalin out of her system when she’s angry. Only then can she discuss something halfway calmly. Unless she’s ill. When she’s ill, there’s no calming her down. I listened for the telltale shrillness but didn’t hear it. She was just angry.

She kept on being angry. From the short spurts of silence, I could tell the cop was getting a few words in here and there, but Mom was still fuming when she hung up the phone.

“And I didn’t do anything!” she wailed—in my direction but really to herself. “I didn’t try to stop them!”

“It was all over in a few seconds,” my father pointed out as he undid his necktie. My father always spoke in a bland voice to counteract my mother’s wildness. “There was no time for any of us to react. And what could we do—take her away from the police? They’ll realize they’ve made a mistake and let her go.”

Mom hadn’t yet wound down to her rational stage, so I knew Dad’s comments would be wasted. I went up to my room and shut the door. I had enough of my own emotions to sort out without taking on Mom’s as well.

I hung up my church dress then sat down on my unmade bed. Camp was over. There was no need to tidy my bunk for cabin inspection, like I had every morning for the past eight weeks. There were no little campers to bully into doing likewise.

None of my regular clothes were clean. Not a single pair of shorts, not one t-shirt. Camp had ended three days before, but I still hadn’t tackled my enormous bag of laundry. Casey had done hers at camp. She had far fewer clothes than I did. She washed them out every night in the bathroom and hung them to dry on the clothesline outside the cabin, or on the end of her bunk if the weather was bad.

“I’ve got to learn to live in the field,” she once said to me as she rinsed out her socks.

“Have at it,” I replied. “I’m going to be a gym teacher, not an entomologist. I’ll live in a house with a washing machine and spend my free time adding up my pension. You’ll spend your life crawling in the dirt and drying the same three pairs of socks in the smoke of your campfire.”

“Jealousy is unbecoming,” she said, flicking water at me from a clean, wet sock.

Casey is orderly. She’s a scientist. I’m a jock. I’m a mess.

I mean I was a jock. Now I don’t know what I am.

And, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much of a jock. To be a real jock you have to care about winning—and winning took too much effort.

I didn’t really want to be a gym teacher, either. People were always asking me what I wanted to be. I had to tell them something so they’d leave me alone.

The only clothing I had that was remotely clean was a pair of pajamas. I put them on, then picked up my duffel bag and hauled it down to the basement. I emptied it out onto the laundry-room floor.

There it was, the whole summer spread out before me—shorts from hot days, jeans from campfire nights, socks with grass stains, t-shirts with little splats of blood from mosquitos slapped too late. I held a sweatshirt up to my face. It smelled of wood smoke.

I didn’t bother to sort out the light clothes from dark. They were camp clothes. They were used to rough treatment.

I shoved as much laundry as I could into the washer. The noise of the machine muffled the sound of my mother’s voice. I closed the basement door to block out the rest. Then I sat down in the beat-up chair we keep in the laundry room—one of Mom’s “projects.” She’d always meant to take an upholstery class and redo it. Casey’s father offered to help her, since that’s one of the things he did for a living, but she could never decide on what fabric to use.

Our laundry room was also a storage room. The shelves were full of projects my mother had started then abandoned but couldn’t part with. My own past was there, too—a guitar, a chess set, an easel and some dried-up acrylics, a tennis racket, lots of things that didn’t work out. My parents kept encouraging me. Casey kept encouraging me. It was all really annoying.

I listened to the
thwack-thwack
of the washing machine and thought about how strange it was to be doing ordinary things while my best friend was in jail for murder.

Then I remembered. Casey was supposed to go to Australia in December for four months. She’d been accepted on some professor’s field team to study insects there. It was a big deal for someone still in high school.

I guess you won’t be going to Australia now, Praying Mantis,
I thought. She wouldn’t be leaving me on my own after all.

Something else nagged at me, something I couldn’t quite name. It didn’t feel good.

I didn’t want to think anymore, so I went upstairs to get something to eat.

“Close the door,” Mom said, as she always did when I stood in front of an open fridge. “We don’t need to refrigerate the whole house.”

I took out the milk and closed the door. Mom hadn’t made anything for lunch. In fact, she was still in her church clothes. I decided on bread and peanut butter.

Mom was glaring at the phone.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You think you know a town,” she replied. “You think you know the people in it, and the things they stand for, and the lines of decency they will not cross. Then something like
this
happens.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked again.

“I’ve called ten people from our church, ten people who have known the Whites since they came to this town. None of them will go down to the police station with me.”

“You’re going to the police station?”

“And that Reverend Fleet! He said he would pray for them!”

“Isn’t that his job?”

“His
job
is to come down to the police station with me and help correct this terrible injustice. Jesus Christ the Lord could be in that cell and Reverend Fleet would not put himself out. I told him that. And do you know what he said? He said, ‘Kathy Glass is a member of our community, too.’ As if one has anything to do with the other!”

I took a bite of my sandwich. The peanut butter gobbed up in my mouth. I had to wash it down with a big gulp of milk.

“I wonder what Casey’s having for lunch,” I said. “Maybe we should take her some sandwiches.”

Mom looked at me, hard, with one of her deep, searching looks. “Jessica Jude, why aren’t you more upset about this?”

“I am upset,” I said. “I’m just…stunned, is all.”

“Well, get unstunned,” she snapped. “Being stunned won’t help your friend.”

Mom turned back to the phone book.

I chewed on my sandwich and listened to her try to persuade people to go to the police station with her. She wasn’t clear what they would do once they got there, other than demand the police let Casey go. It wasn’t much of a plan, but that’s Mom.

Of course the plan went nowhere.

“We need a nickname for you,” Casey says to me one day when we are playing in the patch of meadow near the schoolyard. She is looking at a blue dragonfly that has perched on her arm. “What kind of things do you like?”

I don’t know. I’m not really all that interested in anything. I just pass through each day as it comes to me.

When I don’t answer, she looks up at me.

“You’re wearing the same color,” she says.

I don’t understand, and then I look at the dragonfly. She’s right. We are wearing the same shade of blue.

“We can call you Dragonfly,” she suggests.

And Dragonfly becomes my nickname.

That night, I woke up when the bedroom was still dark. My clock radio read two a.m. I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t get comfortable.

Ride your bike
, a voice inside my head kept saying. I tried reading, but not even that would shut the voice up. Tired of struggling, I rolled out of bed and dressed.

Mom is a light sleeper, even when she isn’t ill. The last thing I wanted was to wake her up. I cringed at every squeak in the floor but managed to get outside without her coming out of her room.

I’d never been biking at that hour of the morning. The town was quiet. I biked from street to street, feeling like the only person awake in the whole world.

I biked over to the police station and circled around and in front of the place where Casey was being held. I imagined her chained to a dungeon wall. Then I imagined her being so busy examining the fleas and lice in the cell that she didn’t even notice the chains. That image made me smile.

It occurred to me what that feeling was—the feeling that had been nagging at me ever since I’d watched Casey being taken away.

I was stuck here in a normal life, in boring old Galloway. Casey had been whisked up into something new, away from me. While I was doing chores and getting ready for school, she was surrounded by excitement, the center of attention. Casey had left me behind.

I was all alone.

And I didn’t like it one bit.

We are in grade seven, spending the afternoon at Ten Willows on a warm September Saturday. It is off-season at the camp, so we have the place to ourselves.

Casey is watching a spider suck the blood out of a fly. She is completely absorbed.

After a while, she says, “I’m going to need to specialize. There are so many insects—over a million different species have been identified. I can’t possibly learn about all of them! I could specialize in spiders, but I don’t think so. And I don’t think it’s butterflies, either. Beetles? I like beetles. A lot. Maybe beetles. But which beetles? There are so many different ones.”

I am bored. “Let’s do something,” I say.

“I am doing something,” she replies. “Look, you can actually see the spider’s fangs! I think it’s eating an anthomyiid fly.”

I pick up a stick and swirl it through the web, ripping it apart. Then I fling it all away.

“She wasn’t finished her lunch,” Casey says.

“Let’s do something!”

“You need a hobby,” Casey says. She walks away to look for another bug.

She sounds just like my mother. I am so upset I walk away from her. Then I start running. I run and run, all around the camp trails, just to get away. When I get back to where I started, Casey isn’t there.

She’s gone looking for me, I think, feeling smug that I’ve made her break off her bug search. I sit, panting from my run, and then decide to go looking for her.

It takes a while.

I find her kneeling on the boardwalk that leads through the marsh. She is looking down at whirligig beetles and pond skaters. She is gently prodding the pond skaters with a thin reed and watching them skim over the surface of the water.

She looks up at the sound of my sneakers on the boardwalk.

“Isn’t this amazing?” she says. “All these different forms of life in one small space—bugs and spiders and birds and plants. I think maybe this is it. I think maybe I’ll specialize in aquatic insects.”

“I’ve been running,” I tell her. “All over camp.”

“That’s it,” she says. “You should be a cross-country runner.”

The day after Casey was arrested was Labor Day. I wanted to sleep in, not just because it was the last day of the summer holiday and school was starting the next day, but because I’d been out riding my bicycle at the crack of stupid. But it was barely eight o’clock in the morning when the cop came knocking.

Our house was one of those small, squished-together ranchers. Casey’s was the same. My bedroom window was right beside the front door, so I could hear Mom open up.

“I’d like to speak to your daughter Jessica,” a female voice said. “Is she here?”

I recognized the voice. It was Detective Ann Bowen. She was the chief investigating officer during Stephanie’s last disappearance.

“Why do you need to talk to Jude?” my mother asked. “You should be out looking for that little girl’s killer, because the girl you’ve got locked up did not do it!”

Then I heard my dad’s voice, calm and bland.

“Won’t you come in?” he said. “I’ll get Jess.”

I jumped out of bed just as Dad rapped on my door. I told him I’d be right out. I threw some clothes on and dashed into the bathroom to splash water on my face and pull myself together. As I came out of the bathroom I heard Mom talking to the cop in the kitchen.

“Her father called her Jessica after Jessica Lang—he’s had a crush on her since
Tootsie
. I called her Jude because of the Beatles song.” Mom was pouring coffee when I came into the kitchen. “Here’s my Jude. She’ll help you any way she can. Casey White is her best friend.”

Mom came over to me and started to smooth down my hair, but I pulled away from her and took a seat at the table.

Detective Bowen nodded her greeting, but I didn’t like the way she was looking at me.

“I don’t know what I can help you with,” I said. “I wasn’t there.”

“Just one or two things,” Detective Bowen said.

“I really don’t have anything else to say.”

“Should I call our lawyer?” my father asked. That’s Dad, cautious to the bone.

“Your daughter is in no way a suspect in Stephanie’s murder,” Detective Bowen said. “You are free to call a lawyer if you want to, but there’s no need. Jess, I know you want to help your friend. There are still a few little points you can help us understand. Will you do this for Casey?”

“She will,” my mother said.

Detective Bowen kept her eyes on me.

“Of course,” I said. “Anything to help Casey.”

“Good.” Detective Bowen smiled. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Could you tell me a bit about Casey’s relationship with Stephanie?”

She took a minirecorder out of her pocket and placed it on the table in front of me. She also took out her notebook and pen.

“Are you all right with me recording what your daughter has to say?” she asked my parents. “As I get older, my memory gets weaker.”

My father hemmed a bit but my mother overrode him.

The cop asked for my permission, too, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no.

“Casey’s relationship with Stephanie,” she prompted.

“She was Stephanie’s camp counselor.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“How did they get along?”

“They got along fine. They weren’t close or anything, but there were seven other kids in our cabin. They all needed our attention.”

Detective Bowen tapped her pen on the table. “So you’re saying there was no special tension between Casey and Stephanie.”

“That’s right.”

“You know, Jess, you seem to be a smart young woman, but what you are doing now is very stupid.”

“There’s no need—,” my father began.

I started to tremble and crossed my legs to control it. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Giving contradictory statements to the police. Makes me think I can’t trust you.”

“Jude, what is she talking about?” my mother asked.

Detective Bowen stared at me. Her stare was even harder than my mother’s, and I couldn’t meet it.

“In our earlier conversations, just after Stephanie’s disappearance was reported, and over the course of the search, you frequently spoke of how annoying Stephanie was, how she’d steal things and disrupt the group. And now you’re saying that Stephanie was a model camper and Casey was a model counselor.”

“Casey
was
a model counselor! You try keeping kids amused all summer without TV, computers, or video games. Casey is amazing at that, much better than me. To me, it’s just a job. The pay is lousy but it’s more fun than working at Burger World. For Casey, it’s something more.”

“Tell me.”

“It was…” I searched for the right word. The only one I could find had a churchy feel to it, but it seemed right. “It was a mission. Like bugs is her mission. She could take a kid who was deathly afraid of bugs, and by the end of camp that kid would be letting spiders and beetles crawl all over her. She says that girls get stronger when they learn to handle bugs, because it means they are breaking the mold that’s been cast for them. Snakes, too. Ask her. She can explain it better than I can. She also believes there’s something magical about camp, that ten days at camp can make everything right with every kid.”

“It didn’t work that way with Stephanie, did it?” Detective Bowen asked.

After a moment, I answered. “No.”

“As a matter of fact, the longer camp went on, the worse Stephanie seemed to get, isn’t that right?”

“Casey tried so hard!” I suddenly felt like crying—my face hurt from the effort to hold it back.

“Someone as dedicated as Casey would keep trying,” Detective Bowen said. “She’d go the extra mile and beyond.”

“Casey White is an extraordinary girl,” Mom interjected. “Disciplined. Dedicated. Honorable. And a joy to be around. Did you know she’s been accepted to join a field study this December on Lord Howe Island off the coast of Australia? Her family’s not rich. She has to cover her travel expenses. She could have found a higher-paying job for the summer—really, any business in town would have loved to hire her. But she had already committed to Ten Willows. ‘I’ll just get a job after school,’ she told me. That girl is not afraid of hard work!”

I wanted Mom to shut up. I’d heard that Industrious-Casey speech way too often.

Detective Bowen poured some more milk into her coffee mug and took a long time to stir it.

“Is there anything else?” I finally asked.

Detective Bowen looked at me and smiled a little. She could tell she’d gotten to me.

“Did Casey ever lose her temper with Stephanie?”

“Casey has never lost her temper,” Mom said. “Not once.”

“Jessica?” Detective Bowen prompted. “We’ve already talked to the girls from your cabin.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

“Detective, if you already have the information, why do you need to hear it again from Jess?” my father asked. “All this has been hard on her, too.”

“I’m just trying to get a complete picture of what happened.”

“I don’t have to answer your questions if I’m not under arrest,” I said. “And not even then. I remember that from law class in grade eleven.”

“I thought you wanted to help your friend.”

“How can this be helping? You’re looking for negative things! Everybody gets mad at kids. Kids make you mad. That’s what they do. Not all kids and not all the time, but they make you mad!”

I got up from the table and fiddled with the orange juice container on the counter, just to get away from her.

“Let’s leave that topic, then,” the detective said. “A t-shirt of Stephanie’s was found in Casey’s duffel bag. Any idea how it got there?”

I was facing the counter, not the table. I felt myself stiffen up. I poured the juice into a glass.

“How would I know that?” I asked.

“It was a t-shirt that everyone assumed she was wearing when she disappeared. It had Tinker Bell on the front of it. Do you remember it?”

I took a swallow of orange juice and turned back to face the table.

“A lot of girls wore Tinker Bell shirts this summer.”

“Her mother said it was her favorite. It wasn’t among her belongings and she wasn’t wearing it when her body was found. But it turned up in Casey’s bag. With bloodstains on it. Both Stephanie’s and Casey’s blood.”

“Kids get injured at camp,” I said. “Scraped knees when they fall, scratched cheeks from flapping branches on trail hikes. Casey and I carried little first aid kits on our belts.”

“So you know nothing about Stephanie’s t-shirt? Because Casey said you must have put it in her bag, that you were doing the cabin cleanup while she was out with the search party. So I’m asking you. Did you put it in her duffle bag?”

“Of course she didn’t,” Mom said. “Why would she put a child’s t-shirt into her friend’s bag? Why would she do that?”

“Maybe it was an accident.” Detective Bowen’s voice was calm in contrast to the shrillness of Mom’s. “Maybe Jess was in a hurry. Maybe there was a lot to do and not much time to do it. I’m not saying she was malicious. Maybe she was just careless.”

At the word
careless
Mom’s head jerked back to look at me. My legs started to shake again. I sat down quickly.

“Did you do that?” Mom asked me. “Because that sounds like you.” She turned back to Detective Bowen. “I keep finding soup tins in the garbage can. The recycling box is right there, but she won’t take two seconds to rinse the can out and drop it in. Won’t take two seconds to help the environment. Casey—”

I saw Dad put his hand on Mom’s wrist to shut her up. I was grateful. She was about to talk about Casey getting the Mayor’s Environmental Award for a campaign she led to turn a trash heap over by the old underwear factory into a nature park. I didn’t need to hear about it again.

“Is that what happened?” Detective Bowen asked me. “And I want you to think before you answer. If Casey gets convicted because of that shirt in her bag, and she is innocent, it means that Stephanie’s real killer is still out there, maybe getting ready to kill someone else. My job is to track down a murderer based on the evidence. And so far, all the evidence is pointing to Casey. If I’m wrong, I want to know. I also want you to think carefully, because there is such a thing as obstructing police in the commission of an investigation. It’s a criminal charge, and lying to the police could be seen as obstruction.”

“That’s enough,” my father said. “There’s no need for that. If Jessica says she didn’t do it, then she didn’t do it.”

“I haven’t heard her say she didn’t.”

That was my cue. All eyes turned toward me.

“I didn’t do it,” I heard myself say. “I didn’t do it.”

August 22

Day 1

It’s opening day of the last camp of the summer. Swarms of girls are crowded into the mess hall with their parents, handing over doctors’ notes and getting assigned to cabins. I recognize some girls from previous years. The repeaters are easy to spot. They are laughing, greeting their friends, squirming away from their parents. The newbies are also easy to spot. They stand close to Mummy and Daddy, looking scared and lost. Some are crying.

When I first spot Stephanie Glass I don’t give her a second look.

I sort of know her from church. I’ve seen her singing in the junior choir and I’ve seen the back of her head as she goes down the aisle to the front of the church for the children’s story and then on to Sunday school. I know her father is dead. Heart attack? Cancer? Whatever. She and her mother sit on the opposite side of the church from my parents, and our families are not friends.

Her being at camp is no surprise. Lots of local kids go. So I ignore her. I am on the lookout for the eight-year-olds I think will be in our cabin. Stephanie looks older than eight.

Casey is standing behind the registration table, ready to immediately greet any kid assigned to Cabin Three. I sit on a bench along the side of the hall, watching and waiting for the kids to come to me. I figure I’ll see more than enough of them over the next ten days.

I’m glad this is the last camp of the summer. I like Ten Willows best when it is just Casey and me. But all summer we’ve been junior counselors assigned to someone else’s cabin. For this camp, one of the senior counselors dropped out at the last minute, and we are finally together.