Positively morbid, p.13
Positively Morbid, page 13
Parker’s old bedroom had been repainted, the dated posters taken down, and the comforter replaced with a quilt. A colorful rag rug warmed the refinished wooden floor, and the scarred old bureau and vanity set had been polished to a shine, their surfaces cleared of clutter. Parker could stand in the middle of the room, shut her eyes, and see the way she’d left it, laundry and books strewn across every surface, closet doors hanging open. She could feel the echo of her last moments in here, shaking the detritus of high school from her backpack and filling it with hastily selected clothes, makeup, shoes, laptop. At the time, Parker didn’t realize that was it. She expected to be caught and convinced to stay, or to cool down and return in a week or two and find a less devastating way to solve everything.
But neither of those things happened. And she’d never come back until now.
She imagined Dad sorting through the mess she’d left, trying to decide what to keep, what to throw away. Catherine had said her things were still here. Parker pulled open bureau drawers and slammed them shut one at a time: empty, empty, empty. Then she threw open the closet and found three good-sized cardboard boxes piled atop each other, with COREY in black marker on the sides. A few familiar jackets still hung on hangers, perfectly good fall and winter coats that her father probably couldn’t bear to give away. Parker held one for a moment, thinking about bringing it back to Oregon, not out of sentimentality but because it was warm and waterproof and nicer than anything she’d been able to afford for herself. Then she let it go.
The top box wasn’t heavy, and the contents didn’t shift when she lifted it off the pile and set it on the bed, so she wasn’t surprised to find it chock full of clothes.
The middle box was more interesting, with favorite childhood books and a few knick-knacks and souvenirs. She turned over a chipped brass rabbit she’d bought on a field trip in grade school, its smooth weight familiar and comforting.
The last box held a mélange of costume jewelry, as tangled as she’d left it, and a pile of notebooks which made her shake her head—old Algebra notes are not sentimental objects, Dad. Underneath was a layer of framed pictures, carefully wrapped, including her favorite of Mom and Dad and her infant self, and some unframed snapshots from middle school and high school that she used to have up on a bulletin board. Corey and Britt and Krista and Eric and Jess in different combinations. Since Jess had just asked about him, she noticed Krista’s little brother Keith in a few. He’d been a cute kid, dark-haired and gangly, easily a foot taller than Krista even when he was a freshman and she a junior.
Parker laughed out loud when she found one of Eric leering in an exaggerated fashion at Britt’s bikini and set it aside to show Jess. There were other friends, too, who’d spent a year or two as part of the crowd and then drifted away, and she studied their faces, reaching back through time for their names, wondering where they’d ended up.
With a half-smile, she shuffled through the whole stack. When she found a good one of Britt, she compared her lively, laughing features with her mother’s cold and haughty visage. How could Parker have imagined they looked alike? And Jess. Parker had remembered his high school self well, but comparing the pictures with his adult face underlined the changes she’d noticed.
She wanted to keep all of these, she realized, and the framed picture of her young parents. She set them in a pile on the floor, then flipped through the notebooks, seeing that the class notes were interspersed with song lyrics and poetry and prose she’d written herself, her form of doodling in high school and probably why Dad had kept them. God, back then she would have been horrified to imagine him seeing these, but now she guessed they were probably no different from any other teenager’s, as age-appropriate as the scribbles they’d all brought home from kindergarten, and heartwarming in their own way.
Reluctantly, Parker closed the three boxes and put them away. Someday, she’d bring everything out to Oregon, or winnow it down and ship what she really wanted. But for now, the photos were enough. They would fit in her carry-on without too much rearranging.
Downstairs, Catherine was nowhere to be seen, and instead of calling out a goodbye, Parker lifted her suitcase and let herself silently out the front door.
Chapter Eleven
Mrs. Laine was in the yard across the street, snipping at the smooth top of a low hedge with gardening shears. “Have a nice visit?” she called.
“Yes, thank you,” Parker said. Unfortunately, even this cool response was enough to encourage Mrs. Laine, who barely glanced both ways before rushing across the street toward her.
Parker focused on her phone to order another Uber and pretended not to notice the neighbor’s approach.
“Your father was so kind to take her in,” the woman said, in a voice that intimated nasty secrets.
Hating herself for it, Parker fell for the bait. “Mrs. Ryden?” she said. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, my. That poor woman lost everything.” Mrs. Laine shook her head regretfully.
Parker could tell where this was going. The neighbor’s tone was rife with assumption and insinuation. Parker had developed an allergy to this kind of gossip while Britt was missing. Nevertheless, she said, “Well, she seemed okay. I mean, I hadn’t known she was in a wheelchair now, but…”
“Oh yes, it’s some kind of nerve disease. What’s it called? It’s truly awful, you can’t imagine. She just went from walking around healthy as you please to being stuck in that chair in a matter of months.”
“Multiple sclerosis?” Parker ventured.
Mrs. Laine nodded vigorously. “I think so. And of course, you know about her daughter being killed. And on top of that, her husband blamed her and her other kids aren’t speaking to her!”
Parker’s ears pricked up. “Blamed her for what?”
“For the middle one. Brittany? Was that her name, your little friend? Poor dear. Well, it turned out that Catherine had made her—you know—get rid of a baby! That would drive any girl away in this day and age!”
Parker looked at her blankly.
Mrs. Laine’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She made her get an abortion!”
Parker blinked. There had been nothing about a baby or a pregnancy in the whole sordid saga of Britt’s disappearance and murder, except possibly in the National Enquirer, right next to the piece on alien abductions. Her face must have betrayed shock, because Mrs. Laine nodded happily.
“Oh yes, I thought your friend would have told you, but then it would have come out in the questioning, wouldn’t it, dear? No, it must have been a terrible family secret. When there are so many childless couples longing for a baby, imagine! There’s no excuse, absolutely no excuse.”
Parker lost her stomach for this conversation, probably due to the vile taste in her mouth. Her phone buzzed, and she looked up to see a dinged-up Toyota heading down the street toward her.
“That must be my ride,” she said in relief. “Thank you again for calling me. I really appreciate it. Got to go!” She extended the handle of her case and hustled to meet the car, not looking back.
****
Parker’s stomach reminded her that the hotel breakfast had been light, but she was too antsy to sit and eat. Thanks to Mrs. Ryden, she would need another hotel room. But what she needed first was some nature, and she knew where to find it.
When she moved to town at age twelve, the woods behind the grade school, bounded by a cemetery, a park, and the town reservoir, were a world in themselves with their own mysterious denizens, animal and otherwise. Sometimes there were tents pitched among the trees, and although Parker realized the people living there had probably been desperate, at the time they’d seemed mysterious, even romantic. People fished in the reservoir from dawn to dusk and sometimes kids on the path would startle deer foraging in the undergrowth or a heron hunting in the shallows.
The Uber driver dropped her at a playground near the start of the path. A bald and bearded guy supervised a couple of toddlers at a three-foot-tall climbing wall, but otherwise, all was quiet. Parker searched for a spot to leave her carry-on. In high school, everyone lugged backpacks everywhere unless someone had a car, but she really didn’t want to drag her suitcase along for a hike. There was no perfect spot, so she detoured off the path to nudge it between the branches of a fallen tree, then headed down the main trail she and her friends used to meander along as teenagers.
With her quick stride, Parker passed a couple of dog walkers and found herself alone. Moving further into the woods, she shivered, but not from the cold. They had all been together here so long ago. The echoes of endless conversations between Britt and Krista and Corey still sounded in these woods. Silliness, intense discussions about the future, arguments, and angst. Romance. She often felt guilty that she’d run away and left so much behind; but now, in a bittersweet way, she remembered. She’d escaped more than the hotbed of rumor and gossip, the backstabbing of former friends and acquaintances. This place was saturated with her history and the pieces of her old self. When she’d left, it clung to her all the way across the country and up the California coast, the miasma off-gassing slowly as she traveled. And now here she was, soaking it up again despite her best intentions when she woke this morning.
Yet, it was a gorgeous fall day, the foliage in full yellow-orange splendor, the air crisp with promise. Parker wandered farther, following looping offshoots of the trail. They had loved it here, she and her friends. Most of their dramas had played out in this wood that felt like it belonged to them, separate from school and home, unsupervised by adults.
Eventually, she found herself back at the reservoir and settled on a boulder, comfortable despite the chill that seeped through her jeans. Her nose was cold, her fingers curled into the ends of her sleeves, but the stillness trumped all that.
Distant children’s voices rose in laughter, some game at the school or the park, but she felt alone. Her eyes unfocused on the blur of light on water, and she let her mind go blank, fixing her awareness on the cool air entering her lungs, redolent of algae and the life-cycle of trees. Everything else faded into the background. Once in a while, she’d start thinking about Catherine or Britt or Adam or Ryan, but she let it go and relaxed into being here, breathing the same air and seeing the same sights that she had as Corey a decade ago.
Eventually, a dog barked nearby, and she roused herself to scope out the path. No one was visible, but she climbed down and stretched, once again feeling like she was getting the hang of meditation. Even here, in the heart of it all, she’d been able to center herself.
Moseying along, she finally allowed herself to consider what she’d been blocking out, what Dad’s neighbor had said. She heard Mrs. Laine’s voice in her head. Catherine made her abort the baby. Her tone held something suggestive and snide that made Parker cringe, but could it be true? Over the years, Parker had accepted that she’d probably never know exactly what happened to Britt, but she never stopped wondering. If Britt were alive, they might have grown apart by now, but that was part of growing up. Missing and murdered was different. It left a dangerous wound that spread pain and depression. Anything that shed light on what happened in Britt’s life in the months before she disappeared might lead to understanding and healing.
So, Britt had been supposedly pregnant. Catherine supposedly forced her to terminate. Neither of those things was technically impossible. Britt had been sexually active. Her mother was massively controlling and viewed her children’s lives as accessories that could flatter or detract from her lifestyle statement. A teen pregnancy in the family would have elicited gossip, judgment, and scorn in her social circles.
The part Parker couldn’t swallow was Britt keeping it a secret.
Their small group had been through pregnancy scares together. The first, most frightening one, was early sophomore year, when Britt was barely fifteen. She and a guy named Travis Decker slept together for a couple of months, and she’d been on the pill since hitting puberty, but her period didn’t come and didn’t come. It was the first time any of the core group had that happen, and they whispered and searched the internet and debated urgently about whether to ask the health teacher how adoption worked if you couldn’t tell your parents.
The only other scare Parker could remember was a year before Britt disappeared. Britt and Jess had been at the height of their relationship, not yet breaking up every other week. They spent all their lunches and hallway time in deep discussion and skipped classes to hold hands and stare moodily into the distance together.
Both times, Britt’s period returned on its own. She would have told her friends if she’d had an abortion, because when Krista had one, they’d talked about nothing else for months. It wasn’t in Britt’s nature to keep something like that to herself. Sharing and venting were how she processed.
At the same time, Jess and Parker had never figured out what caused her to become distant and sometimes cruel before she left. So that was a check in the other column. Could it have been a secret pregnancy, a forced abortion? But why would she hide it from them, when they’d shared the details of everything else?
Walking through crunching leaves, Parker wondered if one or both of the earlier pregnancy scares could have ended by forced abortion. Britt would have had to lie in a way she didn’t seem capable of, not just once, but over and over. And yes, her mother drove her crazy, and Britt was often angry with her—but not to the point of raging hatred, which would have been Britt’s reaction to being controlled that way.
After her death, the police questioned every one of Britt’s friends up, down, and sideways, and they’d all been so young. Could they have lied or evaded questions so successfully that a secret abortion could stay hidden, even under that much pressure?
No. If it were true, Britt had kept it absolutely secret and Catherine had done an amazing job of hiding it from the media. So how would the annoying neighbor have learned about it?
Parker should let it go. It was too far-fetched, and Mrs. Laine had way too much schadenfreude showing. But there had always been unease in Parker’s mind about the change in Britt before she disappeared. It had seemed like she was trying to manipulate her friends into begging for more information, but whenever Corey or Krista or Jess asked what was wrong, she denied it. They didn’t know what to do but to give her more space.
In retrospect, whatever had changed her had probably been the end of Britt’s world, and Parker was haunted by the fact that she hadn’t tried harder to get answers.
She reached a fork in the path and had to decide whether to loop back toward the playground or keep going. She was close to the clearing where they all used to hang out, which wasn’t far from where she and Jess discovered Britt’s body.
Parker dreaded seeing either place because she was already knee-deep in memories. How much worse to be in the clearing. How much worse to look at the place where her stubborn optimism had collapsed under the weight of a devastating reality.
Parker’s stomach growled, but she ignored it. She hadn’t been here in more than eight years. She might not be here again for eight more. Like it or not, she would make herself look.
The trail had become narrow and overgrown, as if seldom used. Where did the high schoolers drink and smoke and hang out away from prying adult eyes nowadays? Parker’s mind jumped to Calli, stuck at her parents’ hotel, and despite the tragedy of her own group of friends, she felt a pang of sympathy. Even with everything that had gone wrong, they’d had each other. At least for a while.
Parker worried at Mrs. Laine’s story as she eased past brambles. She wouldn’t put it past Catherine to try to force Britt to terminate. But Britt would never let her mother bully her into anything. If there had been a secret pregnancy and a secret abortion, Britt must have cooperated for her own reasons. Unless Catherine had some way to blackmail her. Parker almost laughed. What could Catherine do, drug her and drag her to a clinic? How would she find a doctor who would go along with that? And how would she keep Britt quiet afterward, kill her? Not funny.
A flash through the trees startled her, and Parker halted. Something pale and swift, there and gone. A white-tailed deer, a startled bird? She paused, holding her breath, hoping for the deer. It would be a reward for coming out here and facing her past, a good omen.
Instead, her stillness revealed crunching footsteps through the dead leaves somewhere ahead. She couldn’t see anything and stepped off the path toward the noise, then paused again. Silence. A thicket of bushes taller than her head, evergreen with shiny leaves, blocked her view.
Damn. She turned back to the path, and someone yelled “Ha!” and jumped out in front of her.
Screeching, she threw her arms in front of her face, ducking down as if that would protect from an attack. Britt’s corpse flashed into her mind in a moment of terror and self-recrimination. Why had she come here alone, so close to where her friend had been murdered?
But instead of an onslaught of blows, a hand grabbed her upper arm, and a not-unfamiliar voice said, “Hey! Hey, Corey. Oh my god, I’m sorry! Calm down. It’s me. It’s Eric.”
Parker blinked, and breathed, and blinked again, and her brain finally picked out a few familiar features in the man in front of her.
“Holy—holy shit! You idiot!” she cried, and smacked his arm like they were still in high school, but somehow she was smiling too, all that adrenaline washing out in a flood of relief. “What the hell are you doing out here? Oh my god.” Her heart pounded like it would break her ribs, and her face was hot with embarrassment. There had been a moment—a brief moment, but still—when she had absolutely believed she was about to die.
“I couldn’t believe it when I spotted you on the trail,” he said. “Corey Jantzen, in the flesh. You grew up, girl! But I’d know you from a mile away.”
Parker looked him up and down. He wore a white tech shirt, short running shorts that revealed muscular legs, and trail shoes without socks. In high school, he’d been a skinny tech-geek type, smart and intense and definitely not athletic, but he and Jess had been best friends and his dark sarcasm fit the group dynamic. Parker noticed a wedding band on his left hand, and abstract tattoos on both wiry biceps.
