You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (14 page)

The second shot cut her off. Reed heard his mother sigh—and then nothing.

He knew it was her last breath. He knew both his parents were dead.

Horror-struck, he couldn't move. Trembling against the door, he felt his legs start to give out from under him. He held on to the doorknob to keep from crumpling to the floor. With tears in his eyes, he glanced back toward his nightstand—at his phone. He gazed at the samurai swords above his bed. But he couldn't get to them.

He'd always thought that in a crisis like this, he would keep his cool and spring into action. With sheer determination and guts, he'd overcome a gunman threatening him and his family or friends.

Yet, now, he was paralyzed, utterly helpless.

He heard the footsteps once more—coming closer. It sounded like two people. One of them whispered to the other. This time, Reed could make out the faint murmuring: “His room's down the hall. I checked it out during the visit on Thursday. There's no lock on the door . . .”

He heard a strange cackle.

“We're coming for you, Reed,” one of the intruders called softly to him.

He was just on the other side of the door.

Reed recognized the voice.

He didn't think he had anything left, but he still wet himself.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

B
onnie Middleton found the bestseller
Ask a Tall Dark Stranger
listed on Amazon.com. A “sneak peek” option allowed her to read the first few pages for free. The acknowledgments were on the third page, and the aunt's full name was right there: . . .
And many thanks to Andrea Boyle, who helped make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Spencer had said at the memorial service that she was an editor. And this was the only Andrea the author mentioned.

Sitting at her desktop computer in her small pink-and-white bedroom, Bonnie clicked out of Amazon.com, and opened Google. In front of her was a framed poster—Robert Doisneau's famous black-and-white shot of a Parisian couple kissing. Bonnie was wearing blue flannel pajamas.

She was a night owl, and searching for information on Google at two in the morning somehow always seemed more important than sleep. Taylor Swift was on the radio—at a low volume. At this time of night, when she was the only one awake in the house, Bonnie didn't like to use earphones. They blocked the outside noise. Maybe she was slightly paranoid, but she wanted to hear if someone was trying to break into the house.

The Middletons lived in one of those beautiful old stately Tudor-style homes on Queen Anne Hill—with a gorgeous view of the city and water from practically every window but hers. When they'd moved in five years ago, Bonnie had campaigned for this small, rather isolated bedroom with a bath at the top of the back stairs. Her dad said it had probably been a maid's quarters for the house's first occupants. Bonnie had enjoyed the idea of living in a servant's quarters—like Audrey Hepburn in
Sabrina
. She'd also wanted privacy. Her two younger brothers' rooms, a guest room, and the master bedroom were down the hall in practically another part of the house.

Bonnie remembered inviting Tanya McCallum over to see the new house—her room especially. She and Tanya had been best friends in sixth grade. Bonnie hadn't had much of a choice in the matter. She didn't have many friends at the time, and Tanya, living two doors down with her divorcée mom, had glommed on to her. Though Bonnie hadn't particularly liked Tanya, they'd spent a lot of time together—until the Middletons moved into the Tudor-style house on the Hill, nearly a mile away. A mile wasn't really so far away for good friends. But Bonnie used the move as an excuse to see Tanya less and less.

Tanya had made it over to the “new” house only a few times. During that first visit, Tanya kept saying the place was too big—especially for a family with three kids. “Aren't you afraid you'll get robbed or something?” she'd asked. “And your room's totally cut off from the rest of the house. If somebody broke in and came up the back stairs, you'd be the first person they'd murder . . .”

For some reason, Bonnie had never forgotten that. So she never put on earphones when she was up late at night.

And for reasons all too apparent, Tanya had never forgotten that the two of them had once been “best friends”—until Bonnie pulled away. So in Tanya's mind, she was evil incarnate. It didn't help matters that for a while now, Bonnie had been dating Ron Jarvis, who teased and tortured poor Tanya every chance he got.

She didn't feel too good about herself for that. But she'd gotten swept up by the notion of dating the star quarterback. Plus Ron was so cute—especially when he wore his glasses, which deceptively gave him a “sensitive jock” look. They were one of the most popular couples at school. Ron was sexy, and a good kisser. She convinced herself that she was lucky to be his girlfriend.

But Damon Shuler's suicide made her realize that not only was she dating a bully, but she'd become kind of a bully herself. She felt horrible for dumping that container of pencil shavings on Damon's head while he was asleep at one of the library reading tables last spring. She'd meant it as a stupid, harmless joke.

Of course, to hear Tanya tell it, she may as well have poured acid on the back of Damon's head instead of pencil shavings.

Still, it had been a lousy thing to do. Damon was too easy a target. Picking on him in a different, clever way won her points with Ron and his crowd. But she'd simply gone for the cheap laugh.

In the wake of Damon's suicide, it didn't seem so funny anymore. If she could only take that moment back, she would have.

Instead, she broke up with Ron and started to pull away from the others—a little bit at a time. She continued to eat lunch with them. On the surface, they were still nice to her, but she knew her days at the cool table in the cafeteria were numbered. It was just as well. Except for a handful of fellow cheerleaders she genuinely liked, the others were pretty phony.

For example, KC Cunningham had been enormously popular, but her closest friends didn't seem to miss her much. They acted all heartbroken when the local TV stations interviewed them on the news. But no one was really that close to her. No one had known about KC's affair with their English lit teacher. As one cheerleader friend put it, “It's hard to imagine that KC managed to keep it a secret while she was screwing Mr. McAfee. I mean, how could she have not tweeted about it?” No one ever got KC's full attention. She was always on her phone, most of the time posting on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook—usually selfies.

While Bonnie still had a place at the elite table, she tried to be the group's voice of conscience. She figured if she reminded them that bullying was extremely uncool, maybe she could help save other kids from going through what had destroyed Damon Shuler. This, of course, made her a total drag to Ron, Reed, and their pals.

Now that Damon was dead, the group seemed determined to make Spencer Murray's life miserable.

Bonnie wanted to help him. And it wasn't merely because she was trying to make up for what happened to Damon or because she felt sorry for Spencer. She also had a little crush on him.

According to the anonymous text sent to Reed Logan, “Spencer Murray” wasn't even his real name. And he'd spent time in a mental institution somewhere in Virginia. Bonnie wondered if her taste in guys was really that horrible—first a bullying creep and now someone certifiably crazy.

It wasn't likely she'd discover in one Google search Spencer's real name or the circumstances of his institutionalization. But it was worth a shot. Bonnie stared at the keywords beneath the Google banner: Spencer, Andrea Boyle, Virginia. She hit the Enter key and watched the first page of search results come up.

All the results on page one were obituaries that contained the keywords. If she wanted to read up on the death of ninety-year-old Andrea Spencer from Falls Church, Virginia, she was in luck. It was like that for every search result on the page—each time a different combination of those names.

On page two, the third result listed caught her eye:

Bonnie remembered Spencer telling her at Damon's memorial that his parents had died in a car accident. But it was understandable that he wouldn't want to say they'd been murdered. It was also understandable that a kid who had lived through something so horrible might end up needing psychiatric help. According to the article, Spencer and his friend, who was spending the night, were in his bedroom when they heard the gunshots in his parents' room just down the hall.

The article didn't have a picture of Spencer Rowe. But the
Post
had run a photo of his parents, which must have been taken at some semiformal party. Smiling, they both had their arms around each other. Even in the blurry black-and-white photo, Bonnie could tell Lawrence and Vivian Rowe were an attractive couple. Both were only thirty-seven years old at the time of their deaths.

She kept thinking of what Spencer was going through now—with those jerks picking on him at school. Hadn't the poor guy been through enough?

She wondered if the police had ever caught the killer, who made off with some jewelry and the money from Lawrence Rowe's wallet. She shifted around in her desk chair and typed in the search box: Lawrence Rowe, Vivian Rowe, Fairfax Murders.

Bonnie looked at the first result listed, and wondered if she was reading it right.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured. She clicked on the link to an article in
The Washington Post
, dated July 15, 2009. She read the headline:

There was a photo of the once-happy family posing in front of the Jefferson Memorial. Spencer's face was blacked out. All Bonnie could see was his skinny little body in jeans and a Redskins sweatshirt. It took her a moment to realize the newspaper was protecting the identity of a murder suspect who was underage. Obviously, that was why the article didn't mention the name of Spencer's thirteen-year-old friend. In the article, they kept referring to him as “the other boy” or “the older boy.”

Bonnie read through five more articles before “the older boy” was named. Apparently, Garrett Holmes Beale denied any wrongdoing at first. However, a few pieces of Vivian Rowe's jewelry—the pieces that hadn't yet been sold off to pawnshops—were found in a stack of folded sweaters in Garrett's bedroom closet.

Bonnie got the impression that Garrett Beale's lawyers put up quite a defense. But the thirteen-year-old was eventually found guilty of second-degree murder—along with Spencer. Because both boys were underage, the press coverage was a bit limited. From what Bonnie could tell, the trial had been conducted behind closed doors.

According to the articles, Garrett had been spending the night at Spencer's home in the Mantua section of Fairfax. While Spencer's parents were at a dinner party, the boys had found a gun Lawrence Rowe kept hidden in the master bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Rowe returned home before the boys had had a chance to put the gun back in its hiding place. Guests at the dinner party testified that Larry Rowe had seemed intoxicated. When he discovered the boys had found his gun, he flew into a rage. He hit Spencer and threatened Garrett. Spencer shot his father. Then, with “the older boy” manipulating the gun, they shot the mother, too. It was Garrett's idea to make the whole incident look like a house burglary gone wrong.

The boys served their sentences at separate state-run psychiatric facilities. Apparently, the court saw fit to keep the two young killers apart during their rehabilitation. Bonnie wanted to think Garrett Beale was the guiltier party, using his influence on a younger, impressionable kid. But Garrett was paroled in January 2015, several months before Spencer.

The most current article about Garrett was dated April 14, 2015. Bonnie winced at the headline:

The story carried a head shot of Garrett, which looked like a driver's license photo—or maybe it had been taken in the psychiatric hospital or a juvenile detention facility. He was handsome, with messy blond hair and a sexy smile. Bonnie hated herself for finding him attractive. The photo caption read: “Garrett Beale, seventeen, died along with his parents, Clinton and Denise Beale, in their Arlington home. Garrett had recently been paroled after serving nearly five years for his involvement in the shooting deaths of a Fairfax couple.”

There were no articles about Spencer Rowe after his release from Northern Virginia Behavioral Health Center ten months later.

Hunched in front of her laptop, Bonnie read until four in the morning. Yet she had a feeling she wasn't getting the entire story. She still didn't know Spencer well enough to ask him what had really happened.

She shut down her laptop and switched off the radio. Crawling into her twin bed with the Eiffel-Tower-print spread, Bonnie switched off the light. She lay there in the darkness and wondered just how much Reed Logan knew about Spencer.

There was a football game tomorrow afternoon. She'd probably see Reed there. She'd ask him then. Maybe he'd gotten another text from that anonymous source.

If she missed Reed at the game, she could always talk to him on Monday.

 

 

 

Scott Logan was ticked off.

He'd schlepped all the way down from Bellingham on the Greyhound for a Sunday dinner at home. Scott was a sophomore at Western Washington University. He hadn't been able to come down for the entire weekend, but his parents had talked him into coming for a belated birthday dinner for his father. It would be just the four of them, and his mother was cooking a prime rib. So it was sort of a big deal.

When he'd talked to his parents on Thursday, Scott had told them which bus he'd be on. He'd bought his father
The Magnificent Seven
on Blu-ray. After two hours on the damn bus, he'd arrived at the station only to find no one had come to pick him up. He'd called home, but no one had answered.

So Scott took a taxi. He figured it wouldn't be unreasonable for him to hit up his parents to reimburse him for the cab fare. Or maybe it was stupid-ass Reed who was supposed to pick him up. Whatever, somebody had dropped the ball.